Color of bar container when data plotted is empty

I want to access the face color of a bar container object returned by plt.bar(). If the bar() data is not empty, I can do:

bc = plt.bar(1,1)
bc.get_children()[0].get_fc()

However if the data is empty, I can’t do that because the get_children() method returns an empty list, as it should. BUT, it seems like the color cycler is still cycled through once even though nothing gets plotted. For example, doing:

x = np.random.normal(0,1,500)
hist,edges = np.histogram(x,bins=50)
x = (edges[1:]+edges[:-1])/2

bc1 = plt.bar([],[])
bc2 = plt.bar(x,hist)

Only bc2 appears, and appears with the second color of the color cycler ‘C2’. So bc1 was assigned color ‘C1’, but I can’t know this because it has no bar children. Is there another way to access the color of an empty bar container?

There is an existing issue for this (though they want it for legends):