Go-Away-Green: The Colour of Illusion
If you look beyond the fantasy of the Magic Kingdom, Disney hopes you won’t see anything at all.
Any history of camouflage must begin with Mother Nature.
From wood-ants to pufferfish, cuttlefish to octopus and birds, many animals conceal themselves — most times amazingly.
From the dawn of time, humans have also found ways to conceal themselves too. Firstly it was more about the smell, covering oneself with mud to reach prey in nature.
But in the run-up to the Great War, with the threat of aerial reconnaissance, militaries first used camouflage patterning and tactics to hide locations and equipment and not people until the Germans defeated the french army, who wore white gloves and red pantaloons.
Ha, easy targets in it?
The French army developed a stealthier uniform and formed the first units of ‘’camoufleurs’’. They became specialists in camouflage and taught other militaries how to disguise their equipment with paint and use netting interwoven with fake leaves to hide sheds holding military equipment.
Now Disney is pioneering the paint that can camouflage our environment.
Illusion is a key part of Disneyland and Walt Disney World. Disney wants you to feel as though you are in a dream world from the time you enter the parks, where unattractive items doesn’t exist.
Unattractive items like;
- trash cans
- construction sites
- backside of buildings
- administrative buildings
- staff entrances and tunnels
- cameras
- utility boxes
Disney paints them this particular shade of Green to make everything kind of fade away, hidden in plain sight.
They invented and designed this paint colour to make things visually disappear.
More like the colour of “the more you look, the less you see.”
If you look beyond the fantasy of the Magic Kingdom, Disney hopes you won’t see anything at all. The less-than-magical parts of the park, such as fences, garbage bins, and administrative buildings, are all coated in colour known as “Go Away Green” — a shade meant to help things blend in with the landscaping.
You’re probably wondering what go-away green paint looks like;
Go Away Green is a grey-green and bluish shade, tested and formulated to blend well with almost anything whether it is concrete, fences, buildings, landscaping, the sky, you name it.
This colour doesn’t necessarily make things invisible but makes them easy to ignore.
Unlike Olive Drab Green and other shades of Green, Go Away Green is not just a single shade. “Go Away Green” is not what you will get in your local paint store as Disney doesn’t make the precise formula of the hue known to the public.
Although the mainstay colour of Go Away Green matches Gallery Green, but Disney uses various shades and hues.
Here are a few shades that are close enough to go-away-green;
- Agate Green SW 7742 (Sherwin-Williams)
- Gallery Green S400–5M (Behr)
- Hedgerow Mist 22–21 (Pratt & Lambert)
- Mermaid’s Cove DE5641 (Dunn Edwards)
- Aganthus Green, Benjamin Moore
- Spice Garden, Behr
- Pale Jade, Glidden
- Cooking Apple Green, Farrow & Ball
- Relish, Sherwin-Williams
You may mix and match these colors as much as you like, as long as you understand that the purpose is not to stand out.
You do not have to run a theme park to take advantage of its mysterious, cloaking powers. Like Disney, most of the things you need to cover up with paints like go away green are likely outside.
Disney’s green-grey colour is uninteresting enough to fit in with the shrubs, bushes, or grass, so wandering eyes move past it.
Their use of Go Away Green to accomplish this illusion demonstrates the potential of camouflage in daily applications. Don’t be scared to employ camouflage to gain an advantage in security and safety.
