Colour and emotion
The colours of disgust
Brown and murky yellow-green are the colours of disgust. Australia chose a drab brown, Pantone 448 C, to make cigarette packs unappealing.
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Disgust is brown, and after brown a murky yellow-green. These are the colours of rot, mould, mud and bodily waste, and the feeling of disgust exists to keep people away from exactly those things. Studies agree on this more than on most pairings. Still, context decides. The same brown is welcome as chocolate, coffee, wood or earth. A colour disgusts only when it looks like something that might make a person ill, or when it appears where it should not, as on meat or skin.
What studies find
In the 2025 review by Jonauskaite and Mohr, brown was the only colour clearly tied to disgust, in close to half of the studies that tested it. The 30-nation survey found the same link, and found that brown called up fewer emotions overall than any other colour. In research on colour preference by Stephen Palmer and Karen Schloss, dark yellows and yellow-browns were the least liked colours, and people said they recalled vomit, faeces and rotting food. Their explanation is simple: people dislike colours that go with things they dislike. The evidence is reasonably good, with one caution. Most participants were shown flat colour patches, not real objects.
In language
English speakers who feel sick are 'green around the gills', and anyone unwell is 'off colour'. A bitter, sour view is 'jaundiced', from the yellow skin of jaundice, and a sickly look is 'bilious', from bile. In Chinese a face can 'turn green' with shock, sickness or fury. Sickly green and yellow are the colours of a face, and brown is the colour of the thing that caused it. Disgust has fewer colour idioms than anger or sadness. Languages name the cause directly, as dirt, filth or rot, and Hindi, Arabic and Japanese words for disgust carry no colour at all.
Around the world
Brown and dull green are not disliked everywhere or in every use. Brown is the colour of soil, grain, wood and most human skin, and of the plain robes of Franciscan friars. Khaki, from a Hindi and Urdu word meaning dust-coloured, became the world's standard for uniforms. The Natyashastra, India's classical text on drama, gives the mood of disgust, bibhatsa, the colour blue, perhaps recalling bruised or lifeless flesh. Ancient Greek medicine blamed moods on body fluids, among them yellow and black bile, and left Europe its sallow, bilious vocabulary. The disgust response is shared. What sets it off is partly learned.
Where it is used
The best known use is deliberate. In 2012 Australia required all tobacco to be sold in plain packs of a drab dark brown, Pantone 448 C, after market research found it the least appealing colour tested. Smokers linked it with dirt and tar. Britain, France, Ireland, New Zealand and other countries later adopted similar packs. Elsewhere the aim is to avoid the effect. Food makers keep murky browns and greys off packaging, and cartoonists paint poison, slime and sickness a bright yellow-green. The nauseated emoji is green, as is the character Disgust in Pixar's Inside Out, whose makers have said she was inspired by broccoli.
Disgust in colour, place by place
Since 2012 tobacco has been sold in plain packs of drab dark brown, Pantone 448 C, chosen after research found it the least appealing colour.
Britain, France, Ireland and New Zealand followed Australia in requiring cigarette packs in the same drab brown.
In Pixar's film Inside Out (2015) the character Disgust is green from head to toe, matching the green of a queasy cartoon face.
The Natyashastra assigns blue (nila) to bibhatsa, the mood of disgust, one of the eight moods of classical Indian drama.
Greek medicine tied moods to body fluids, including yellow bile and black bile. English still calls a sickly look 'bilious' and a sour outlook 'jaundiced'.
In Chinese a person's face is said to 'turn green' (lian dou lü le) when they are sickened, shocked or furious.
Colours that carry disgust
Also part of it, and being written: Brown.
Sources and further reading
- Pantone 448 C on Wikipedia
- Tobacco in Australia (Cancer Council Victoria): Packaging as promotion, evidence for plain packaging
- Palmer and Schloss, An ecological valence theory of human color preference (PNAS, 2010)
- Jonauskaite and Mohr, Do we feel colours? A systematic review of 128 years of research (Psychonomic Bulletin and Review, 2025)
- Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz: Colors evoke similar feelings around the world
Original text by the Rang desk, written with AI assistance and checked against the sources above. Meanings of colour vary from place to place and person to person. If we have something wrong, tell us.