Changing a material's colors anywhere else besides the Update function has no effect,Changing Material's color works on Update but not on another method

I have a function called CreateColor that simply takes an hex string (like "ff00ff" = pink) and returns a new Color object that represents that color. When I call primaryMaterial.SetColor("_Color", CreateColor("ff00ff")); on the Update method everything works as expected and primaryMaterial indeed becomes pink. However, when I call the same piece of code outside of Update it has no effect. I'll paste the current code that I have just in case it is of any help: https://pastebin.com/SSsqawQj