Can You Own a Color Trademark? Proof, USPTO Filing, and Scope

You can register a color trademark in the United States, but only under narrow conditions: consumers must already associate that specific color with your brand in a specific product category, and the color cannot serve any practical function in the product. Owens Corning’s pink insulation, Tiffany’s robin’s egg blue, UPS’s brown, and Christian Louboutin’s red shoe soles all cleared that bar. Most colors, on most products, will not.

The Supreme Court opened the door in Qualitex Co. v. Jacobson Products Co. (1995), holding that “there is no rule absolutely barring the use of color alone as a trademark.”¹ What matters, the Court said, is a mark’s ability to identify a source, not the form the mark takes. The Lanham Act’s definition of a trademark — “any word, name, symbol, or device” — is broad enough to cover color.²

The Two Things You Have to Prove

A coined word like “Xerox” can function as a trademark the day it’s invented. Color doesn’t work that way. Nobody sees a green package and instinctively links it to one company. That’s why every color trademark has to clear two separate hurdles.

Secondary Meaning

Secondary meaning is the mental link consumers form between a color and a single source. The color has to stop being just a color and start functioning as a brand signal. Building that association takes years of consistent, exclusive use combined with heavy advertising.

The USPTO and courts want to see concrete evidence. The strongest proofs are consumer surveys showing brand recognition, long and exclusive use of the color in commerce, substantial advertising expenditures featuring the color, sales volume and market share, and unsolicited media coverage tying the color to the brand. Surveys tend to carry the most weight, and not having one can hurt an application badly.

Non-Functionality

A color cannot be trademarked if it does practical work in the product or gives the seller a competitive advantage beyond source identification.¹ The Supreme Court defined a functional feature as one “essential to the use or purpose of the article or affects the cost or quality of the article.” If letting one company own a color would put competitors at a real disadvantage — because they need it to communicate something about their own products — the color is functional and unavailable.

Orange for high-visibility safety gear is functional. So is a pill color that helps patients tell dosages apart, green for lawn care products, or brown for chocolate packaging. To qualify for protection, the color has to be purely decorative or brand-identifying, with no connection to how the product works or what it’s made of.

Companies That Actually Own Colors

Only a handful of brands have cleared both hurdles, and they share a common profile: decades of consistent branding and heavy investment in tying one color to one product category.

Owens Corning became the first company ever to trademark a color in 1987, registering pink for fiberglass insulation. There is no functional reason insulation needs to be pink; the company chose it and spent years promoting it, including a long-running partnership with the Pink Panther.³
Tiffany & Co. trademarked its robin’s egg blue (Pantone 1837, a reference to the year the company was founded) for jewelry-related goods. The phrase “Tiffany blue” has entered everyday language.
United Parcel Service registered its Pullman brown in 1998 for delivery and logistics services, building the association through its fleet, uniforms, and the “What Can Brown Do for You?” campaign.
Christian Louboutin secured protection for the red lacquered sole of its shoes, though a federal appeals court narrowed the mark to situations where the red sole contrasts with the rest of the shoe. An all-red shoe does not infringe because there is no contrast to trigger the brand association.

What ties these together is scale. A startup with a year of sales is not going to convince an examiner that consumers already read its color as a brand.

Registering With the USPTO

Color trademarks go through the same application system as any other mark, but examiners scrutinize the distinctiveness question much more closely.

What You File

Your application needs a color drawing of the mark on a white background, a statement that color is a feature of the trademark, and a written description saying where each color appears on the product.⁴ The USPTO wants colors described in common everyday terms (blue, red, dark green) rather than Pantone codes, though applicants routinely add Pantone references in the description for precision. Electronic submissions use RGB.

If you’re filing based on current use in commerce, you also need a specimen showing the color as consumers actually see it: on packaging, on the product, or in marketing materials.

Fees and Timing

The base filing fee is $350 per class of goods or services as of March 2026. Additional charges apply if you use free-form descriptions instead of pre-approved terms from the USPTO’s Trademark ID Manual ($200 extra per class) or if you supply insufficient information ($100 extra per class).⁵ Average time from filing to registration or abandonment is roughly 10 months, based on USPTO data updated in February 2026.⁶

Color marks routinely take longer than word marks because examining attorneys almost always demand extra evidence of secondary meaning. Plan on investing in consumer surveys and pulling together detailed records of advertising spend, sales figures, and length of use before the application makes it through.

What the Protection Actually Covers

Owning a color trademark does not give you a monopoly on that color. Protection is tied to the goods or services where you’ve built consumer recognition. Tiffany’s blue is protected for jewelry and related packaging; a manufacturer of industrial machinery could paint its lathes the identical shade without infringing, because no one shopping for a lathe is going to think it came from Tiffany.

Likelihood of Confusion

The core question in an infringement case is whether consumers are likely to be confused about who makes, sponsors, or is affiliated with a product. Federal law prohibits using a mark in commerce in a way that is “likely to cause confusion, or to cause mistake, or to deceive.”⁷

Courts weigh several factors: how similar the two colors are, how closely related the products or services are, whether the parties sell through the same channels, how sophisticated the typical buyer is, whether the alleged infringer meant to copy, and whether anyone has actually been confused. No single factor decides the case; the analysis is holistic, and which factors matter most depends on the facts.

Dilution for Famous Marks

A famous color mark gets an extra layer of protection. If a mark is widely recognized by the general consuming public as identifying a particular source, the owner can stop others from using a similar mark even without any likelihood of confusion.⁸ Dilution comes in two forms: blurring, which weakens the distinctive link between the mark and its owner, and tarnishment, which damages the mark’s reputation through negative associations.

The bar is high. “Famous” here means recognized by the general public, not just within a niche industry, so most color marks won’t qualify. For the ones that do, dilution reaches across product categories that a normal infringement analysis would miss.

Defenses Someone Can Raise Against You

Not every use of a trademarked color counts as infringement. Three defenses come up regularly.

Nominative fair use. Someone can use your color to accurately refer to your product, if the product couldn’t be readily identified without it, only as much of the mark is used as necessary, and nothing about the use suggests you endorse or sponsor them.⁹ A retailer that carries Tiffany products may reasonably use Tiffany blue to say so.

Descriptive fair use. Using a color to describe a product’s appearance, rather than as a brand identifier, can be protected. A paint company selling a shade called “robin’s egg blue” is describing what the paint looks like, not claiming a Tiffany connection.

Functionality challenge. An accused infringer can attack the trademark itself by arguing the color is functional. If a color serves a practical purpose in the product category — improving visibility, signaling a chemical property, matching industry convention — a court can strip the protection entirely. This is the most powerful defense because it kills the mark rather than just the claim.

Keeping the Registration Alive

Federal trademark rights need ongoing maintenance. Miss a deadline and the registration is cancelled.

Between the fifth and sixth anniversary of registration, file a Section 8 declaration confirming continued use, with a current specimen and a $325 fee per class. A six-month grace period is available after the sixth anniversary at an extra $100 per class.¹⁰⁵
Between the ninth and tenth anniversary, and every ten years after that, file a Section 9 renewal along with another Section 8 declaration.¹⁰
After five consecutive years of continuous use following registration, you can optionally file a Section 15 declaration to make the mark “incontestable.” This narrows the grounds on which someone can attack the registration; a challenger can no longer argue the mark lacks secondary meaning. Functionality remains a valid challenge even against an incontestable mark, so this does not make a color trademark bulletproof.¹¹

You also have to police the mark. Trademark rights weaken when the owner tolerates widespread unauthorized use. For color marks, that means monitoring competitors in your category and sending cease-and-desist letters or filing complaints when someone adopts a confusingly similar color.

What You Can Recover If Someone Infringes

The Lanham Act lets a successful plaintiff recover the infringer’s profits from the unauthorized use, actual damages, and the costs of bringing the suit.¹² Courts can increase the damages award up to three times actual damages when the facts warrant it.

Counterfeiting carries harsher consequences. Courts must award triple profits or triple damages, whichever is greater, plus attorney fees, unless extenuating circumstances exist. Alternatively, a plaintiff can elect statutory damages instead of proving actual losses: $1,000 to $200,000 per counterfeit mark per product type, or up to $2,000,000 for willful counterfeiting.¹² In exceptional cases the court may also award reasonable attorney fees to the prevailing party.

The most common remedy in practice is an injunction ordering the infringer to stop using the color. Money matters, but what most trademark owners want is to get the offending color out of the marketplace before it erodes their brand.

A Note on Color Combinations

The analysis shifts slightly for a combination of colors rather than a single shade. A distinctive color scheme on packaging or on a product’s overall appearance can be protected as trade dress, and a combination may qualify as inherently distinctive in ways a single color cannot. A trade dress claim still requires either inherent distinctiveness or secondary meaning, and functionality remains a bar.

One boundary worth flagging: copyright and patent law will not help you protect a color as a brand identifier. Copyright covers original works of authorship and does not reach a single color.¹³ A design patent can include color as part of the ornamental appearance of a manufactured article, but it protects the overall design, not the color itself, and expires after 15 years.¹⁴ A trademark can last indefinitely as long as you keep using the mark and filing maintenance paperwork.

1
LII / Legal Information Institute. Qualitex Co v Jacobson Products Co 514 US 159 (1995)
2
Office of the Law Revision Counsel. 15 USC 1127 – Construction and Definitions
3
Owens Corning. Our Story
4
USPTO. Drawing of Your Trademark
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USPTO. USPTO Fee Schedule
6
USPTO. Trademark Processing Wait Times
7
Office of the Law Revision Counsel. 15 USC 1114 – Remedies; Infringement
8
Office of the Law Revision Counsel. 15 USC 1125 – False Designations of Origin, False Descriptions, and Dilution Forbidden
9
Ninth Circuit. 15.26 Defenses – Nominative Fair Use
10
USPTO. Registration Maintenance, Renewal, and Correction Forms
11
Office of the Law Revision Counsel. 15 USC 1065 – Incontestability of Right to Use Mark
12
Office of the Law Revision Counsel. 15 USC 1117 – Recovery for Violation of Rights
13
Office of the Law Revision Counsel. 17 USC 102 – Subject Matter of Copyright
14
USPTO. 1503 Elements of a Design Patent Application Filed Under 35 USC Chapter 16