Bold tones showing up on items from refrigerators to telephones.(Knight Ridder Newspapers)

We may be in the middle of winter, but in terms of color trends, it's hot out there, baby!

Home furnishings, appliances, even soap dishes are ablaze in electrified shades of watermelon, tangerine and strawberry.

Gone are the muted lilacs, blues and greens popularized by Martha Stewart and Pottery Barn in the late `90s. Those hydrangea hues have been displaced by a PowerPuff palette of neon brights.

Where did these vivid colors come from? Or, as my husband is wont to ask in all matters of style, who makes up these rules? In the world of interior design, colors are dictated by a mere handful of trendsetters, according to Darren Haun and Steve Maturo, owners of Museo, a Kansas City, Mo., contemporary furniture store. "Someone picks one orange, say, and everyone jumps on it," Maturo says. "Last year at the Milan fair everything was orange."

Haun says colors in home furnishings follow haute couture closely, with a lag time of about a season. Pointing to a green couch, he says to Maturo, "You had a shirt that color last year." For 2001, Maturo sees a return to `60s colors _ particularly green _ but in shades that are clearer, less muddy. More lime, less forest, one could say.

Nicholas Abnos, owner of Abdiana, a furniture store in Kansas City, Mo., says he has noticed an overall boldness of furniture color in European cities and Japan: "Neon shades of blue, orange, pink _ and particularly green _ are very hot." He says some customers are shocked at first by the brightness of some pieces in his store. At the same time, he sees a growing willingness of people to experiment with color as the trend toward ultra-bright shades spreads inland from both coasts and downward from high-end purveyors to mass merchandisers.

Indeed, mundane items like telephones, microwave ovens and irons now come in vivid plastic housings of mandarin orange, wild cherry and poison green. (Call it the iMac factor.) Even my scribbled notes have a certain mod flair, thanks to my Uni-ball pen with its passion pink ink.