Last week, Pantone announced that the Color of the Year for 2012 is Tangerine Tango, aka PANTONE 17-1463. “Dance into the New Year with this Vivacious and Appealing Reddish Orange.”

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Courageous. Confident. Vital. A brave new color, for a brave new world. Let the bold spirit of Honeysuckle infuse you, lift you and carry you through the year. It’s a color for every day – with nothing “everyday” about it.

Okay, “brave new world” may be a tad hyperbolic, but everyone from the Wall Street Journal to the UK’s Independent and every blogger in between has gone giddy over Pantone’s announcement last month that the color of the year for 2011 is PANTONE 18-2120 Honeysuckle:

… Honeysuckle emboldens us to face everyday troubles with verve and vigor. A dynamic reddish pink, Honeysuckle is encouraging and uplifting. It elevates our psyche beyond escape, instilling the confidence, courage and spirit to meet the exhaustive challenges that have become part of everyday life.

“In times of stress, we need something to lift our spirits. Honeysuckle is a captivating, stimulating color that gets the adrenaline going – perfect to ward off the blues,” explains Leatrice Eiseman, executive director of the Pantone Color Institute®. “Honeysuckle derives its positive qualities from a powerful bond to its mother color red, the most physical, viscerally alive hue in the spectrum.”

For more than a decade, Pantone’s color of the year has had a quite an effect on trends in everything from fashion, home and industrial design. A number of fashion designers have jumped on the bandwagon to make Honeysuckle “the defining hue” for Spring 2011 collections, and some of my favorite interior design bloggers have already chimed in with their ideas for how Honeysuckle can transform our living spaces. (Like this great post from Elements of Style)

In principle, that all sounds great. I’m all for “elevating my psyche” but I didn’t think I was going to like it. Guess what – I do. Love it! Viscerally alive is exactly what I want to be this year! I’m gettin’ my Honeysuckle on.

There is not a single room in my apartment that even comes close to having this kind of structure, but I love the saturation of color they’ve used here. This gorgeous pink would clash revoltingly with the brown/green/black granite on the counters in my kitchen so, since the kitchen is open to my living room, that rules out changing my living room color palette. I’m thinking it’s going to be a Honeysuckle bedroom for me. My bed will look great against this color and I already have pink flannel sheets and the Pottery Barn shell bedding I bought last summer. Imagine this against a Honeysuckle wall; it’s as if it were meant to be.

From a fashion perspective, the pinks in my closet have been pushed back to make room for the palette of grey, blue, brown and black that I’ve been favoring for the past year or so. It might be time to haul them back out! A flash of pink here and there should be enough to bring on sufficient “confidence, courage and spirit to meet the exhaustive challenges that have become part of everyday life.” In fact, the wearing of pink gem stones is believed to encourage love and support self-esteem.

Excuse me Christopher Kane while I switch to a different version of your rent-endangering celestial frock.

To quote Janel Laban at Apartment Therapy, “Out with the calm and in with the wild!” Count me in.