Pantone 448C, aka “opaque couché”.
Is Pantone 448C the world’s ugliest color? Many people think so, including the 1000 smokers who participated in an Australian research and marketing project aimed at creating an unappealing but compulsory plain package for all cigarettes sold down under. I picked up the story of Pantone 448C, aka “opaque couché”, as reported by UK newspaper The Guardian. But, I’ve long known this color as a component of my synesthesia. And while I agree that it’s not a particularly alluring color, I’m convinced opaque couché helped me learn to read and write.
My grapheme->color synesthesia gives each of my letters and numbers a distinct, unique-to-me color. My “A” is a deep aquamarine blue, my “B” a scarlet pink, etc. Like many synesthetes, the first letter of a word colors the rest of that word. For example, the word “book” is scarlet-pinkish-red. Although its comprised of a scarlet “B”, two white “O”s and a seafoam green “K”, when I see the whole word, it appears to me in scarlet.
My letter “T” is a light warm brown, and my letter “H” is a shade of green that leans toward chartreuse. But something funny happens when they are side-by-side in a word like ‘though” or “thought”. When I see T and H next to each other, they both turn a weird brownish-greenish-grey, almost the exact shade of Pantone 448C. And while, I find the color kind of ugly, it begs me to notice it. That odd color really stands out in a way that made it quite simple for me to differentiate between words that are easily confused by early readers, words such as ”tank” and “thank”, or the words “though”, “thought”, and “through”.
A few weeks ago, I wrote about the misconceptions that accompany public perceptions of synesthesia. One of those misconceptions is the idea that synesthetes experience a world of exquisite rainbow hues. In truth, many people with grapheme->color synesthesia have really hideous colors that inform their synesthetic perception. Though I find Pantone 448C to be pretty ugly, I like it, through and through…
