It can be easily observed that a white support printed with halftone ink layers changes color when coated with a clear layer. The color change can be explained by purely optical phenomena, for example the perception of a different amount of light scattered by the ink-matter interface if the observer is not too far from the specular direction. But color change can be also observed far from the specular direction, especially with halftone colors, where the support has not a homogeneous reflectance at the mesoscopic scale. This is due to subsurface optical phenomena investigated only recently in the case of uniformly colored support. In the present paper, thanks to an original optical model dedicated to halftone colors, we show that this subsurface phenomenon tends to increase the chance for light to meet several ink dots, therefore the chance to be absorbed.