FASHION : Color Trends Certain to Cause Consumers a Case of the Blues : If you’re passionate about purple, forget it. Marketing firms will decide if the hip shade this year is hunter green or coffee brown.

Some years ago, we moved into a country cottage in a remote setting, a place that cried out for rustic ambience. Eagerly, we filled it with pine furniture, natural fibers and earth tones. Mainly, we used brown, an honest, heartland color--the shade of forests, soil and oat-bran.

Perhaps a bit compulsively, we gathered chestnut rugs and camel upholstery, bronze-and-beige draperies, sepia towels, a chocolate-hued telephone, brown dish drainer, shower liner, soap dish and toilet brush.

These last few gave out, at length, and needed successors. But alas, by then brown decor had been wiped from the face of America.

Toilet brushes, you will note, are light blue, pink or almond this year; and consumers had better march to the beat. Why should manufacturers cater to the oddball tastes of throwbacks? Brown is deader than road kill. Finis.

Think back. Remember avocado refrigerators? Copper washers? Gold-and-olive sofas? Maroon bathroom tile? They’re gone--swallowed by the ooze of landfills like so many saber-toothed tigers.

Why, future generations will ask, as they uncover these worthy treasures? Because their time had come.

Color cycles are relentless. They revolve in unswerving arcs, propelling a fashion hue from timid introduction through heady involvement to climax. Then, they carry that color into the void, leaving in its wake indifference, or perhaps heartbreak. But a replacement is ready to infatuate anew.

Is conspiracy involved? As it turns out: yes.

“Companies usually belong to one of a couple of different organizations of color marketing firms,” said Sue Reynolds, interior designer at Interior Form and Function in Camarillo. “Car, clothing, furniture manufacturers participate; they forecast six months, one year, two years in advance. They say, ‘We anticipate these colors are going to be popular.”’

Then, she explained, members from subgroups--housewares, floor coverings, whatever--vote for their choices, and an industry palette emerges.

Out-voted color combinations are warehoused for awhile, then dropped; decorators have to work around those limitations.

Some colors cycle through faster than others.

“I try to stay away from things that look real trendy,” said Reynolds. “I would never do a burgundy and gray office. Pretty soon you’d know exactly when that was done.”

Burgundy sounded disposable enough. But shouldn’t brown be around for the long haul?

Despondent over our pastel toilet brush, we took this question to the top: Rubbermaid. Their manager of Color and Lifestyle Trends, Andre Doxey, was patient. It is not a simple thing, he said, to keep a color in production. Where once industry may have pushed a color agenda, now it tracks the nation’s mood, and responds wherever public favor falls. It is about to fall on hunter green.

So, dark green kitchen and storage accessories will flood the market next year.

“It started in fashion,” said Doxey. “(Green) was pulled from going to the cabin in the woods, escaping, getting away from the everyday craziness--the green grass and things of that nature.”

The runner-up new favorite, deep blue, is attributed to the nation’s love of denim. And other choices are identified with nostalgia for the ‘70s: berry red, and (surprise!) a shade of avocado.

So far, the yellow-green tone is hovering in the high-end market, because the mainstream still has not recovered from its earlier avocado romance, the color specialist said. Definitely, the green will have a different name--and, like other ‘70s repeats, a brighter tone.

Or, as Doxey put it, “They’re not as putrid as they were back then.”

So how long will it take before brown returns? A year and a half for housewares, we learned. It might have been even longer, but there is this current love of coffee, being followed by a passion for tea, which will drive the demand for tawny housewares.

It’s about time, we thought, appeased. But right away, anxiety set in.

There are, after all, certain brownish products that are out of favor. Refried beans are getting a real bad press, right? And, what about--gasp!--tobacco?

We can see the writing on the wall--the condensing of brown’s popularity curve to a quick blip of fame, followed by oblivion.

So, we resolve to take that window of opportunity to stockpile brown implements for the future.

Siege mentality? Call it what you will; we prefer to think of it as lifestyle insurance. There’s a long dry spell coming, and this time we want to ride it out in style.