Two material changes have altered the festival within living memory, and both are worth recording because they are specific rather than general laments about modernity.
The colours were traditionally made from plants. Palash flowers gave orange, turmeric yellow, indigo blue, and various barks and berries the rest, and the powders were understood to have a protective or medicinal function in a season of changing weather. Industrial synthetic pigments displaced these in the twentieth century, and a proportion of what has been sold contains lead, chromium, mercury compounds and industrial dyes, documented in Indian dermatological and toxicological studies reporting eye and skin injury. Campaigns for a return to plant-based colours have had partial success and the products are now widely available.
Bhang, a preparation of cannabis, is traditionally consumed at Holi in the north, in a milk drink or in sweets, and its use at the festival is long-established and legally tolerated in several Indian states through licensed government shops, notwithstanding narcotics law. This is an unusual survival: a specifically ritual intoxicant with statutory accommodation.
Water use has become an issue in drought years, and some cities and communities keep a dry Holi with powder only.
The festival has also travelled, and the colour-throwing has been detached from it entirely for commercial events in Europe and North America with no religious content. Whether this constitutes appropriation is argued within Indian and diaspora communities rather than settled, and the argument is not one-sided.