At the end of 2019 a banking-app concept by the designer Alexander Plyuto went viral on Dribbble — buttons that were 'the same colour but with a soft raised shadow,' reshared tens of thousands of times within a week. The Ukrainian designer Michał Malewicz then wrote the article that named the aesthetic 'Neumorphism' (New + skeuomorphism).

Its maths is simple: take an element, give it the same colour as the background, add a bright white shadow at top-left and a dark grey shadow at bottom-right. The whole element looks extruded from a clay floor. Parts of the 2020 Apple Watch UI, smart-home apps and a wave of meditation/health products all borrowed it.

But it has a fatal flaw: insufficient contrast. When a button is the same colour as the background, visually impaired people, older users and anyone looking at a phone in bright light simply can't see it. It fails almost every WCAG accessibility standard.

The conclusion: fine as a 'dreamy hero visual'; absolutely not for a 'primary operating interface.' Today neumorphism turns up occasionally in dashboards, settings panels and portfolio sites — but no mainstream app adopts it wholesale. It is a beautiful but short-lived experiment.