Pantone 448 C is a
colour
Color (or colour in Commonwealth English; see spelling differences) is the visual perception based on the electromagnetic spectrum. Though color is not an inherent property of matter, color perception is related to an object's light absorp ...
in the
Pantone
Pantone LLC (stylized as PANTONE) is an American limited liability company headquartered in Carlstadt, New Jersey, and best known for its Pantone Matching System (PMS), a proprietary color order system used in a variety of industries, notably gr ...
colour system. Described as a "drab dark
brown
Brown is a color. It can be considered a composite color, but it is mainly a darker shade of orange. In the CMYK color model used in printing and painting, brown is usually made by combining the colors Orange (colour), orange and black.
In the ...
" and informally dubbed the "ugliest colour in the world", it was selected in 2012 as the colour for
plain tobacco and cigarette packaging in
Australia
Australia, officially the Commonwealth of Australia, is a country comprising mainland Australia, the mainland of the Australia (continent), Australian continent, the island of Tasmania and list of islands of Australia, numerous smaller isl ...
, after market researchers determined that it was the least attractive colour.
The Australian Department of Health initially referred to the colour as "
olive green", but the name was changed after concerns were expressed by the Australian Olive Association.
Since 2016, the same colour has also been used for plain cigarette packaging in many countries, including Belgium, Canada, France, Ireland, Israel, the Netherlands, Norway, New Zealand, Slovenia, Saudi Arabia, Singapore, Thailand, Turkey, the United Kingdom and Uruguay.
The colour has also been widely but erroneously reported as being known as "opaque couché";
in fact this is simply French for "layered opaque", in reference to being used on coated paper. The confusion may have arisen because "Pantone opaque couché" is the French name of a swatch library (
palette) used in
Adobe Illustrator
Adobe Illustrator is a vector graphics editor and Computer-aided design, design software developed and marketed by Adobe Inc., Adobe. Originally designed for the Apple Inc., Apple Mac (computer), Macintosh, development of Adobe Illustrator began ...
containing this colour and intended for printing in solid ink colours on coated paper; in English this library is known as "Pantone solid coated".
References
Shades of brown
Tobacco control
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