The World’s Ugliest Colour

They call it Opaque Couche, with an accent on the e that I can’t make with this American keyboard. It’s in the Pantone paint family, and it’s a mix of camo green, puppy poop and the shade of sky just before a tornado forms. You don’t want it on your walls. 

No one set out to create the ugliest colour in the world. A colour specialist at Pantone probably thought this dark and creepy shade had a place in the palette of interior decorators. Perhaps they thought it was so unconventional it was attractive, like Steve Buscemi or Tilda Swinton. But once it was shown to 1,000 Australian smokers, alongside other colour choices, it earned the ugly title. If it was yo Mama, it would be so ugly… when it sat on the beach, cats would try to bury it! *rimshot*

The Australian government was on a hunt for the queen of ugly colours in 2012 to put on cigarette packs. Last week, on World No Tobacco Day, The World Health Organization asked all countries to disallow logos and company colours, even those horrifying images of people suffering the ravages of smoking, and force big tobacco to wrap their products in plain packs. Aussies bought 11% fewer smokes once the packaging changed to plain ugly, and they’re calling it a victory. Several other countries are poised to follow suit and they’re thinking about using Opaque Couche as well. In Canada, the consultation process will soon get underway, although Imperial Tobacco has already vowed to fight to keep their company logo on their products. Big tobacco launched legal challenges in Australia and the UK, and they lost, so our federal government isn’t too worried.

If cigarettes didn’t bring in so much tax revenue, they’d probably just get banned. But they’re cash cows for federal coffers so governments will regulate the hell out of them while counting on people to continue to buy them. On the one hand, politicians warn about smoking’s toll on the health care system, while claiming to discourage it. On the other, they keep the product available and burn out their calculators totalling up their share of the revenue. Since the year 2000, cigarette packaging has included stark and horrible images of what smoking can do to people but somehow, an unappealing shade of green is deemed even uglier than a blackened lung. We’ll see.