The process begins by having the two parties, Alice and Bob, publicly agree on an arbitrary starting color that does not need to be kept secret (but should be different every time). In this example, the color is yellow. Each person also selects a secret color that they keep to themselves – in this case, red and blue-green. The crucial part of the process is that Alice and Bob each mix their own secret color together with their mutually shared color, resulting in orange-tan and light-blue mixtures respectively, and then publicly exchange the two mixed colors. Finally, each of them mixes the color they received from the partner with their own private color. The result is a final color mixture (yellow-brown in this case) that is identical to the partner's final color mixture.