"Back in 2012, the Australian government hired research agency GfK to spearhead the new package design for all tobacco products. But instead of the marketing firm's usual goal, they had to accomplish the opposite. Every carton had to look as unappealing as possible." —House Beautiful Website.
All colors look a bit different when viewed on different monitors, different printing papers, or created in different programs, so you might see slight variations in the coloration in this example, but the principle is essentially the same for any color: mixing colors together results in new colors, and sometimes to our surprise.
This ugly color can be made using traditionally favorite Christmas colors, red and green (depending upon the exact hues involved and amount of each color mixed together). In this case, I have selected a warm red, dark green, and mixed the two by adding an overlay to the red of a 77% tint of the green.
The resulting mix creates the "world's ugliest color" made from one of the world's favorite festive color sets. In Subtractive Color, red and green are complements of one another. The complement, or opposite hue of any color, when mixed into its partner color will create a continuum of color variations and hues depending upon how much of each color is added. The color of the lesser amount is called the "polluting color," and you can see why in the gif animation shown below; the green "pollutes" the red to approximately create the Pantone 448C color.
Note: The primary colors of Subtractive Color, such as paints and inks, are traditionally: red, yellow and blue (now magenta, yellow, and cyan). The complementary sets are: red/green, yellow/violet, and blue/orange. Mixing each set together equally always results in neutral gray providing the two colors in the set are exact opposites. Mixing all three primaries results in black or dark gray.
The primary colors of Additive Color, such as a monitor displays, are: red, green, and blue, and have very different mixing properties, e.g., when adding 100% green to 100% red, the result is pure yellow; mixing all 3 primaries at 100% results in white.
