Can I set a $variable's display color with <<set>>?

Question

Just learning Twine 2.0 and building a simple branching story flow to practice. Is it possible to change the color a variable whenever its text is displayed using <<set>>? Would make life much simpler than running down every possible combination and adding text-change HTML. 

Example: if the player chooses one of three colors for their Road variable in Passage 1, can I set both the value and the color for their Road choice in Passage 2 somehow?

 

(set: $life to "...")
(set: $road to "Yellow")

You're walking down the $road road and pass by a tree.

What does it look like?

[[Alive]]
(put: "Alive" into $tree)
[[Growing]]
(put: "Growing" into $tree)
[[Spooky]]
(put: "Spooky" into $tree)
[[Stunted]]
(put: "Stunted" into $tree)
[[Withered]]
(put: "Withered" into $tree)

 

Answer 1

You need to state which story format (name and full version number) you are using, as answers can be different for each one.
Your question title includes the <<set>> macro from SugarCube but your example contains Harlowe syntax macros, based on your example I am going to assume you are using Harlowe v1.2.4 as your story format.

Harlowe has a (text-colour:) macro which can be used to either directly colour text or it's return value can be assigned to a story variable while can be used to colour text instead.

(set: $colour to (text-colour: "yellow"))

$colour[This text should be yellow]

(set: $colour to (text-colour: "green"))

$colour[This text should be green]

As explained in the macro's documentation you need to pass a valid colour value to the macro.