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 couche, No. 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 experts later noted that it was also similar to the hue of the dress worn by Leonardo da Vinci's Mona Lisa.
Australia then mandated "plain packaging" for cigarettes that was actually anything but plain. The opaque couche-colored boxes have vivid pictures of rotted teeth, tongues with tumors and images of dangerously tiny newborns, along with warnings about smoking's dangers printed in type larger than the brand names.
Australian-style packages can be seen here: bit.ly/28PgsSi.
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.
In May, the European Court of Justice rebuffed legal challenges by tobacco companies to the use of such 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. The U.S. tobacco industry has blocked attempts to mandate them on cigarette packs sold in the United States.
Under the U.S. Tobacco Control Act passed by Congress in 2009, health warnings on cigarette packages sold in the United States were enlarged. Two years later, the federal Food and Drug Administration published a rule requiring that packages would have to show images of the negative health effects of smoking as well as warning statements. Tobacco companies challenged the rule, and it was thrown out by the U.S. Court of Appeals.
ActiveStyle on 06/27/2016