Paint Tricks: Use Disney’s “Go Away Green”

Disneyland and Walt Disney World are big on illusion. The masterminds—Disney calls them “Imagineers”—behind the theme parks even invented a paint color that was designed to make things visually disappear. They call it “Go Away Green,” and you don’t have to run a theme park to take advantage of its mysterious cloaking powers. In fact, we’ve found some super close matches to Go Away Green so you can try a paint color that’s similar!

Growing up in Florida, you tend to learn a lot of Disney secrets, but this particular fact from Mental Floss was new to me:

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 a color known as “Go Away Green”—a shade that’s meant to help things blend in with the landscaping.

From the moment you step inside the parks, Disney wants you to feel as though you’ve been transported to a world of fantasy—one where unsightly things like trash bins don’t exist. So they paint them this very specific shade of green to make everything kind of fade away- hidden in plain sight.

This particular Disney fact, as I’m sure you’re thinking, is actually really helpful to know. Go Away Green is a gray-green (and kinda bluish) shade, tested and formulated to blend in well among almost anything: concrete, landscaping, the sky, you name it.

The color doesn’t make things truly invisible, but it does make them really easy to ignore. This is something you can take advantage of at home by, say, painting the fence around your air conditioner Go Away Green.

It’s kind of tough to find an example of this technique in real life since people taking photos of their homes are more apt to crop out their water meter, no matter how well it blends in. However, you can see what we’re talking about in the stock image above.

Disney doesn’t make the exact formula of the shade known to the public, but here are a few Go Away Green matches that you can pick up at your local paint store:

• Aganthus Green, Benjamin Moore
• Spice Garden, Behr
• Pale Jade, Glidden
• Cooking Apple Green, Farrow & Ball
• Relish, Sherwin-Williams

Re-edited from a post originally published 6.22.15-NT