Global health authorities are trying to get more countries to mandate the use of the “world’s ugliest color” on cigarette packaging to discourage smoking.
Global health authorities are trying to get more countries to mandate the use of the “world’s ugliest color” on cigarette packaging to discourage smoking.
In 2012, GfK Bluemoon, a market research company under contract to the Australian government, announced that nearly 1,000 smokers had voted that a drab greenish brown known as opaque couché, number 448c in the Pantone color matching system, was the world’s most repulsive color.
It was described as looking like death, filth, lung tar or baby excrement. Color aficionados later noted that it was also similar to the hue of the dress worn by the Mona Lisa.
Australia then mandated “plain packaging” for cigarettes that was actually anything but plain. The opaque couché-colored boxes have vivid pictures of rotted teeth, tongues with tumors and dangerously tiny newborns, along with warnings about smoking’s dangers printed in type larger than the brand names.
Australia has been very successful in getting smokers to quit, so health officials in Britain, France and Ireland have announced plans to imitate the packaging.
Last month, the European Court of Justice rebuffed legal challenges, by tobacco companies, to the use of shocking images, and India’s Supreme Court ruled in favor of letting them cover 85 percent of packs.
A recent study in JAMA Internal Medicine found that these pictures prompt more smokers to at least try to quit, but the U.S. tobacco industry has blocked all attempts to put them on cigarette packs sold in the United States.
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