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Facebook recoloured the Messenger logo, adding colour to the long-standing white and blue icon. Mashable reported the company's explanation that the new logo reflects a shift to the future of messaging, a more dynamic, fun and integrated way to stay connected to the people you are close to. Mashable's own summary was less lofty: Facebook had added a purple to blue gradient.

Adweek described the result as a new yet familiar colour scheme, one resembling the colours used by Instagram, another member of the Facebook family of apps. The refreshed look was built into the logo and the app's main chat theme from launch day.

The logo was only part of the update. Mashable noted that Facebook rolled out chat themes alongside it, letting people make their chats more colourful, and Adweek listed custom reactions as part of the same release. The shape stayed recognisable; what changed was the colour.

Facebook's designers later published the backstory. Messenger was born in 2011 as an expansion of Facebook's chat and had been overhauled in 2013 and 2018; by 2020 it had added Rooms, Watch Together and AR effects, and was about to launch cross-app chat with Instagram. Research showed people saw it as the Facebook app's chat service, so the two goals were to recast it as a place to hang out across apps and to signal more than messaging. The team explored solid colours, three-dimensional versions and even no colour, worked with Facebook's in-house agency Creative X on how options would look in ads, and research picked a gradient it called ultraviolet. It then tested dropping the speech bubble, since most rivals use one, but people preferred the original composition by a large margin. A new illustration system, with objects seemingly carved into the app's surface, completed the set.

The design logic is family resemblance. Giving Messenger Instagram's warm gradient tells users that the two apps belong together. Colour is the cheapest way to signal that kind of integration without touching the shape people already know.

The cost is distinctiveness. A blue bubble was Messenger's own; a gradient bubble looks like a cousin of Instagram. On a home screen full of gradients, that makes the icon slightly harder to find. As corporate strategy the choice is coherent. As an icon it trades a clear identity for a family likeness, which is exactly what its owner wanted.