I was just able to do this using Angular Material 1.1.0.
You use the md-colors directive similar to how you would ng-class:
<span md-colors="{color:'primary'}">...</span>
The above code will color the text the primary color. The object that you pass to md-colors uses the key as the css property (i.e. ‘color’, ‘background’, etc) and the value as the theme and/or palette and/or hue you want to use.
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