Updated LEGO® colours: 427 Cool Yellow & 426 White

January 2025 LEGO® Marvel set 76313 MARVEL Logo & Minifigures, and March 2025 sets LEGO® Art 31215 Vincent van Gogh – Sunflowers and LEGO® Architecture 21062 Trevi Fountain have introduced two new colours to the LEGO colour palette. Did you spot them?

While we did notice there had been a change in shade of Bright Light Yellow (TLG name Cool Yellow), we missed the new White, until LEGO colour guru Rylie Howerter brought the updates to our attention. Read on to find out more about these "new" colours.

Products in this article were gifted by The LEGO Group; the author's opinions are their own.
This article contains affiliate links to LEGO.com; we may get a small commission if you purchase.

There are two official new colours to discuss, although you can see that these are not exactly new colours.  Let's call them updated colours, as they are new formulations of existing colours. 

Importantly, they have been given new LEGO Colour IDs and names:

• 427 COMPD. COOL YELLOW V.3 replacing 226 Cool Yellow
• 426 WHITE V.3  replacing 1 White

We are not entirely sure why these colours have been updated but it could be related to colour consistency, especially with regards to cool yellow.  For example, back in April 2020, Tom reviewed LEGO® Creator Expert 10271 Fiat 500 and there were some inconsistencies with the shade of cool yellow elements in that set.  

For white, the rationale behind the change is harder to figure out.

427 Compound Cool Yellow v.3

Above you see the official PR images of the LEGO van Gogh Sunflowers set, and Tim's pictures of the copy shown at Fan Media Days. Both show colour variations between the various cool yellow elements forming the the background. 

However, Eero's review of set 31215 had a reassuringly uniform shade of cool yellow. He noted that some of the existing cool yellow parts had new Element IDs, and now it turns out the official LEGO colour chart has a new entry: 427 Compd. Cool Yellow v.3, which we will simply call 427 Cool Yellow.

On the top, we can see 2x4 tiles in the original 226 Cool Yellow shade and the bottom row are 427 Cool Yellow. It's a subtle difference but the newer shade is a little lighter and less saturated than the previous shade. However, as Eero mentioned in his article, 427 Cool Yellow matches well against some of his 226 Cool Yellow pieces dating from the late 2000s. Perhaps the new formulation restores cool yellow to its original hue? Let us know if you are able to compare this for yourself.

The image above illustrates the subtlety of the change as there's a mix of 226 Cool Yellow and 427 Cool Yellow elements, but can you spot the difference?

426 White v.3

We reviewed 21062 Trevi Fountain earlier this year and you may have noticed that we did not mention any colour updates – the change is very subtle!

All the elements on the left are from 21062 Trevi Fountain and all the elements on the right are from a mix of sets released in 2023 and '24. As you can see, they look the same!

The only clear way to see the difference is to backlight the element to show the different degrees of opacity.

• Panel 1 x 6 x 5 in 426 White (6550180 | 59349) – above left 
• Panel 1 x 6 x 5 in 1 White (4504228 | 59349) – right

426 White appears to be a denser formulation that doesn't allow light through to the same extent as 1 White. 

Here's a second example:

• Plate Special 3 x 4 with 1 x 4 Center Studs in 1 White (6132741 | 17836) – left
• Plate Special 3 x 4 with 1 x 4 Center Studs in 426 White (6550154 | 17836) – right

While the updated elements using 426 White shown here are from Trevi Fountain, 76313 MARVEL Logo & Minifigures which was released two months earlier also has new element IDs for parts using 426 White. There's no doubt that more sets will follow, in fact we have the June LEGO® Ideas set 21357 Luxo Jr. in hand, and it uses 426 White.

It is interesting that the opacity of white has been increased, as the opposite occurred when dark red was updated in 2019, as noted by Sven Franic in a thorough article about the changes to dark red.

One longstanding issue with white is its potential for discolouration, so it will be interesting to see if the new 426 White addresses this common complaint. 

All the elements above are 1 White in colour; the ones on the right showing a clear yellow discolouration are just older, or have been in models on display.

Obtaining the new LEGO white and cool yellow

It seems the new formulations are being included on a set-by-set basis, perhaps to avoid the mismatches of shade within each model, which is a nice step for TLG to have taken. As mentioned, we believe at time of writing that only one available set contains the new cool yellow so far, and two contain the new white.

If you don't want those 3 sets, what about buying them as loose parts? BrickLink and other third-party sellers are highly unlikely to separate the shades, however some sellers may be able to identify which sets they took the elements from if you ask nicely.

A guaranteed approach would be to order elements that have never appeared in white/cool yellow prior to the release of these sets, but a look at our data shows there is only one element out of the 3 sets that fits the bill: the unprinted Toy Horse Head in White (6550130 | 1703) from Trevi Fountain.

It takes 4 months from a set's release for its new pieces to be added to the LEGO® Pick a Brick service, so we must wait another two months for parts from Sunflowers and Trevi Fountain, however the Marvel Logo set has just been added to PaB, including white pieces. It looks suspicious though – there are only the 9 white elements there (pictured above), yet the set comes with over 50 types of white element. Some of the Element IDs do indeed match the instruction booklet inventory, but without knowing more of the situation internally, we are uncertain whether the pieces that would come from Pick a Brick would be 426 White or just 1 White. 

If any of you have ordered those 9 parts from Pick a Brick this month, do let us know which white you got! 

The LEGO.com Replacement Parts service is no help either...

The above example shows a search within set 31215 for the 2x4 tile in 427 Cool Yellow (6554797), which comes up as not found – the same goes for all the other new cool yellow element IDs in the set as well as all new white elements in Trevi Fountain, and the white elements in Marvel Logo except for the 9 currently on Pick a Brick.

This is actually a symptom of another issue. In May 2024, the Replacement Parts API (also known as the Customer Service API) stopped showing new elements in inventories. Those of you who use Brickset's parts database may have noticed this, as they rely wholly on that API. At Rebrickable and here at New E, TobyMac vigilantly scours the data each month to fill in the gaps for you.

We are surprised that this apparent bug has still not been fixed a year on, especially given the frustration it must cause customers trying to get replacement parts.

Conclusion

These two updated colours are not as big a change as the Great Grey Incident of 2003 and while yet another variation in shades is frustrating for MOCs, it feels like there will be long term positives in terms of colour consistency, for cool yellow in particular.

The change to white is harder to spot unless you use a light to test opacity, and even then there are variations always found in the opacity of elements in general so it's not a foolproof method. Only time will tell if the updated white improves some of the discolouration issues, but that would be an amazing improvement.

For the time being, the only way to reliably acquire these new colours is to buy the sets they come in! We will mention in our upcoming reviews of new sets if they use them.

Set 76313 on LEGO.com
Set 31215 on LEGO.com
Set 21062 on LEGO.com

READ MORE: All the new moulds and recolours in 75409 Jango Fett's Firespray-Class Starship

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