Shalia Martin and Kassiane Asasumasu created “Tone It Down Taupe” as autistic satire. The phrase emerged in 2013 as a pointed response to fear-heavy autism awareness campaigns, especially the culture around “Light It Up Blue.” Taupe was deliberately unexciting. That was part of the joke.
The original idea flipped the usual awareness script: instead of treating autistic people as the population everyone else needed to understand, it mocked the alarmism around autism and asked why so much public messaging centred fear, cure rhetoric and making autistic people easier for non-autistic people to accept.
That history matters. “Tone It Down Taupe” wasn’t originally a new official autism colour, and the taupe infinity symbol used in URevolution’s design is a later interpretation of the phrase rather than the symbol used in the 2013 campaign.
What does “Tone It Down Taupe” mean?
“Tone It Down Taupe” is a satirical phrase about toning down the fear rhetoric around autism. Its message is simple: autistic people do not need a month of alarmist messaging about how frightening autism is. They need respect, support and a bigger say in how autism is represented.
The phrase works because taupe is deliberately dull. Where “Light It Up Blue” asked people to make autism highly visible through a colour campaign, “Tone It Down Taupe” answered with a colour that was intentionally muted and ordinary. The contrast was the point.
Where did Tone It Down Taupe come from?
Shalia Martin and Kassiane Asasumasu: the creators
Shalia Martin is the “Lia” in Kassiane Asasumasu’s March 24, 2013 post, Tone It Down Taupe this April! on Radical Neurodivergence Speaking. The initiative was their shared creation.
Kassiane’s account credits Shalia with suggesting the phrase during a discussion sparked by Judy Endow’s image about people who are not autistic. It also credits Shalia with making the ribbons and providing the tutorial. Shalia helped give the joke a name and something people could make and wear.
Kassiane published the explanation of the campaign’s satire and shared Shalia’s tutorial. The post thanks Shalia and Judy for the brainstorming, with a separate acknowledgement of Shalia’s craft work. That wider conversation is part of the history, alongside Shalia and Kassiane’s creator credit.
There is a reason to be precise about these contributions. An article about autistic people taking control of their own representation should make the people behind the idea visible. Leaving Shalia identified only as “Lia,” and Kassiane as an unnamed blog author, did neither creator justice.
You can find public profiles of both creators on the Foundations for Divergent Minds board page, and visit the Tone It Down Taupe Facebook page.
The campaign then used parody to turn familiar autism-awareness ideas inside out. Instead of presenting autistic people as an “epidemic,” it joked about the overwhelming number of people who were not autistic. Instead of asking autistic people to make more eye contact or appear less autistic, it mocked those expectations.
“Tone down the fear rhetoric. Tone down the alarmism.”
That line from the 2013 post gets closer to the meaning of the phrase than any colour symbolism invented later. Taupe was not chosen because it had a long-established connection to neurodiversity. Its blandness helped carry the satire.
What was the campaign satirising?
At the time, autism awareness campaigns often spoke about autism through crisis language: rising prevalence, burden, cure, tragedy and fear. “Light It Up Blue,” strongly associated with Autism Speaks, became one of the best-known examples of mainstream autism awareness.
Many autistic advocates objected to that framing. The problem was not that people had heard too little about autism. It was that much of what they heard positioned autism as something happening to families, schools or society, while autistic people themselves were often treated as supporting characters in their own story.
“Tone It Down Taupe” used humour rather than a solemn counter-campaign. It exaggerated the logic of awareness rhetoric until that logic looked as strange as it actually was.
Why the colour taupe?
Taupe was useful because it was almost aggressively unremarkable.
That makes the phrase easy to misread now. If you encounter a taupe infinity symbol on a shirt or graphic, it can look as if taupe itself has become an established autism-acceptance colour. Historically, though, the colour choice was part of the satire. It was a way of saying: lower the volume on the panic.
URevolution’s Tone It Down Taupe design uses a taupe infinity symbol as a contemporary visual interpretation of that idea. The infinity symbol is widely used in neurodiversity contexts, but it was not the symbol described in the original 2013 Tone It Down Taupe post.
Wear the phrase, once you know what it means.
Our Tone It Down Taupe T-shirt uses a taupe infinity symbol with the original phrase as a statement against fear-based autism messaging.
From autism awareness to autism acceptance
The argument behind “Tone It Down Taupe” still shows up in debates about Autism Awareness Month and Autism Acceptance Month.
Awareness can be useful when people genuinely lack information. But awareness alone says nothing about the quality of that information. A campaign can make autism highly visible while still repeating stereotypes, speaking over autistic people or treating autistic traits primarily as problems to be managed.
Acceptance asks a harder question: what happens after people know autism exists?
That means listening to autistic people about language, access, sensory environments, work, healthcare, communication and the everyday assumptions that make life harder. It also means accepting that autistic people do not all agree with one another. There is no single autistic opinion on symbols, terminology or campaigns.
For more on that shift, read Autism Acceptance not Awareness.
Why “Light It Up Blue” remains controversial
Criticism of “Light It Up Blue” did not appear because autistic people objected to a colour. The deeper objection was about who controlled the story and what that story said.
Autistic writers and advocates have repeatedly challenged awareness campaigns built around fear, fixing or cure narratives. Christa Holmans, the Neurodivergent Rebel, has written about why many autistic people reject “Light It Up Blue” and prefer campaigns such as #RedInstead that centre autistic perspectives rather than fear-based messaging.
You can read that perspective directly in The problem with Autism Awareness Month: why autistic people urge you not to Light Up Blue.
Is Tone It Down Taupe still relevant?
Yes, because the argument was never really about taupe.
It was about what happens when autism advocacy is designed mainly for non-autistic comfort. It was about who gets quoted, who gets listened to and whether autistic people are treated as authorities on their own lives.
The phrase also shows why humour can do useful political work. “Tone It Down Taupe” did not answer fear rhetoric with another grand awareness campaign. It made the fear rhetoric look absurd.
More than a decade later, that is still a useful test for autism content: does it help people understand autistic lives, or does it mainly help non-autistic people feel that they have done something by noticing autism?
What URevolution means by Tone It Down Taupe
URevolution uses the phrase as a statement against alarmist, fear-based autism messaging and in support of autistic people having greater control over how autism is discussed.
Our design is not the original 2013 campaign artwork. It is a later URevolution interpretation that combines the phrase with a taupe infinity symbol.
The initiative was created by Shalia Martin and Kassiane Asasumasu. URevolution’s later use of the phrase does not make us its creators. Our product is one way of carrying that critique into something people can wear.
Shop Tone It Down Taupe
Further reading
- Tone It Down Taupe This April — Radical Neurodivergence Speaking, March 24, 2013.
- The problem with Autism Awareness Month — Neurodivergent Rebel.
- Light It Up Gold for Autism Acceptance — URevolution Magazine.
- Shalia Martin’s Tone it Down Taupe - an Allism to Normal Translation Guide, credited on Lulu to Renae (Shalia) Martin. Published in 2025, it uses humour to examine non-autistic expressions and communication.
Attribution correction: This article has been updated to recognise Shalia Martin and Kassiane Asasumasu as the creators of Tone It Down Taupe, explain their documented contributions and link to the project and Shalia’s book. The original publication date has been retained.
