Gray has an undertone of green, purple or blue... best to match those with the surrounding colors. Maria Killam (of Colour me Happy blog) has a few rules for selecting gray shades. She is working out of Canada, but translation for the paint names should be available. Her posts on gray undertones including color samples are also very informative. -VW Working with Grays: 5 Rules of Thumb By Maria Killam 1. Decide whether you want your gray to have a green, purple or blue undertone, it will make it much easier to choose. 2. Consider your fixed elements when choosing a gray undertone. 3. Work with the light in the room. 4. If the house is empty at the start of a project, do not fill the walls with 10 samples of gray paint colours. 5. Choose your fabrics first. If you look closely at this kitchen (above) the stone countertop and flooring and subway tile have a green undertone while the interior panels of the doors have been painted a blue-gray. It's subtle and doesn't look necessarily wrong (to the untrained eye) but can you see it now that I'm describing the difference? Most people can. Here is a link that might be useful: Image Source: What Everyone should know about Gray

The truth is there are few, very few, true neutral greys. Thinking that all grays have either a green, purple, blue, pink, brown undertone is just plain the wrong way to think about it. It's bassackwards. And this is why/how: It's not a matter of looking at grey paint colors and trying to determine their colorful undertones. It's a matter of *seeing* colors that have been grayed down SO FAR they look almost neutral, achromatic, colorless -- or *grey*. Also correct to say toned down, knocked back or desaturated instead of grayed down. Some say there's no difference - it's a matter of semantics- undertone vs. grayed down. But it's not. It's a matter of a fundamental understanding of how color works three-dimensionally in the built environment Plus, it's not how architectural paint is mixed - architectural paint isn't mixed from the point of view of adding color to create an undertone. It's mixed from the perspective of chromaticity (or colorfulness) and managing it down - desaturating, knocking back, toning down. Hyper-focusing on just one part of a color, the undertones, instead of reaching for a more holistic embrace of overall color characteristics especially when dealing with color three-dimensionally isn't wise. If you have little natural light and are relying on recessed lighting, then I'm guessing your room is basically lit by halogens. Halogens produce clean, *white* light and render colors accurately. So that's what we're essentially working with - clean, white light that will render your paint colors accurately. The Master Palette from ICI/Dulux which is now AkzoNobel has one of best collections of grey paint colors. Under that AkzoNobel umbrella is the brand Glidden. So that means that The Master Palette is also used for the Glidden brand. Which means you can go to The Home Depot, because they carry Glidden Paint, and get color chips from The Master Palette. Here are six greys I think you should try (get chips): Silver Cloud 30YY 63/024 Sutton Place 30YY 54/030 Zeppelin 30YY 46/036 Grey Pearl 10YY 63/027 Roma Haze 10YY 54/034 Chinchilla White 10YY 46/041

Anyone have a room painted one of these colors, and if so, would you care to share a photo? Thanks.

It helps to understand this: All color wheels, like the one I use, are a slice from the middle of three-dimensional color space like you see in this video of the Munsell color space. Tints, tones, shades, muted, near neutrals - they're all accounted for in a color space as you can see. Also important:The definition of overtone is when you sense two colors at the same time. It's a compound color experience. The overtone color in the combination is the one that's sensed more intensely compared to the other. Overtone precisely describes compound color experiences by identifying the bossier of the two colors. So, now on to your comments about Gray Cashmere... WOW. I would have guessed that it was more toward blue than green - the color looks like a very light blue. Plotting a color on a color wheel like I did here, illustrates where the color and its entire family "lives" in its color space. Specifically, we can see what hue families it lives next to. Colors that belong to the green-yellow hue family can have yellow or green overtones. In the case of Gray Cashmere, we can see by looking at where it's plotted on the color wheel that it 'lives' OVER near the green hue family so we know to expect OVERTONES of greeness - more so than overtones of yellow. But Gray Cashmere is also very low in chroma (colorfulness) - it's a grayish color. It's nearer a true neutral gray than it is its saturated green-yellow hue parent. That means it's a near neutral. Again, near neutrals don't have a lot of their saturated hue parent chroma, they're grayer. That means they are easily influenced by light and context and as a result, near neutrals like Gray Cashmere can shift in certain qualities of light. Color shift is different from overtones. Colors from Gray Cashmere's hue family neighborhood are known to shift and look blue -- but that doesn't mean they belong to the blue hue family. It's important to remember that they still belong to the green-yellow hue family. Because when we know what hue family a color belongs to according to its spectral data (its color DNA) we can anticipate, predict, and most importantly explain WHY. We can explain WHY a color from the green-yellow hue family has a yellow or a green overtone. We can explain WHY it shifts and looks blue. But I guess the kind of blue is due to some yellow, which causes this. The colorants in the formula provide zero information about what a color will look like. Because there is more than one way to mix a single color - several combinations of different colorants can result in the same color. That's why the only thing that matters is what the color looks like when it's dry.