Just like Components save a reusable piece of UI, Styles save a reusable value — a color, a shadow, a text setting — so it can be applied consistently everywhere and updated everywhere at once.
Pick a fill color in the Design panel, then click the small style-grid icon next to the Fill row to save it as a named Color style — "Primary/Orange," for example. Every layer using that style updates instantly if the style's color is ever changed, exactly like a Component but for color instead of a whole layer.
Effects — drop shadows, inner shadows, blurs — work the same way. Rather than manually tuning a shadow's blur and offset on every card in a design, apply a saved Effect style once and every card shares the exact same shadow.
Beyond styles you create yourself, Figma can connect to shared libraries — a team's design system, or a public one like Material Design — that ship pre-built color and effect styles ready to use. The panel below shows Figma's effect-style picker with a Material 3 elevation library available.
The payoff is the same as Components: one update, everywhere at once. A rebrand that changes the primary orange to a different shade takes one edit to a Color style instead of hunting down every rectangle that happens to be that color.