If you don't get responses here, you might want to try posting on the Home Decorating forum.

Dovetail looks like a greenish/brownish gray.

So even if it's on the same strip card, it could have different undertones? If so...that might solve my dilemma...I'd rather greenish/brown undertones than blue/purple!

I am just judging by eyeball. The color professional who sometimes visits GW has said to assume nothing with the long color strip. She could explain undertone to you. Someone should have told you that sometimes the sample is different from the gallon. It is said here often enough. Not to mention that I am looking at chips on a screen so it will look different in person. Doesn't the one on bottom seem more blue to you?

As to your Hammered Zinc wall goes, the people at the Home Decorating forum can suggest things to minimize what you call purple undertone.

So even if it's on the same strip card, it could have different undertones?

Undertones are purely subjective, experiential and have nothing to do with paint colors. Really. They don't.

All paint color collections are based on hue families.

To that point, Sherwin Williams just released their new in-store color display which organizes their colors by hue family first, then by saturation (vivid to dull). Major colorimetry kudos to Sherwin Williams for getting it right.

When it comes to the old SW color strips, there is no guarantee that all the colors on the strip are from the same hue family. They *might* be. They might not.

A paint color strip is not a color string. A color string is when you take the darkest color in the group and do mathematical "let-downs" so you end up with different value steps of the same color. Most paint color strips are not color strings, are not mathematical "let-downs". Color string color strips do exist in the market, but there aren't many.

The majority of the time you have a random collection of paint colors with *maybe* some attribute or aspect in common featured together on one strip.

(so if you come across some kind of magical "paint color system" that claims to make paint color selection "no-fail" based on fandecks or color strips know that they're total b.s.)

I'd rather greenish/brown undertones than blue/purple!

Dovetail SW 7018 belongs to the yellow hue family. Which is why even the digital swatch looks far away from anything blue/purple. I know it belongs to the yellow hue family because I'm that color professional who sometimes visits the GW. ;)

Lowes mixed it and it turns out, the gallons I bought were slightly different than the sample can I used and based my decision on. So...I'm thinking I may be able to wind up with more paint at their expense (hiring painter for my vaulted ceilings, though, is on me).

When you cross brands and color match, all bets are off, no guarantees. Lowe's uses different colorants than Sherwin Williams. While Lowe's (or any place) can indeed produce a color match that might meet paint industry standards for being a "color match", no one is promising that it's going to look and behave in situ exactly like the original SW color mixed using original SW product.

Thanks Lori.

I think my biggest mistake was assuming the strips were color strings. In all my (20) years of amateur-ish painting, I've always assumed that. And, I've never had such a hard time with a color before. In fact, I've never even reconsidered painting a room immediately after it was painted. Gray, though, is obviously a different story.

I'm wondering where you found this hue info from SW. Can you find the Hammered Zinc? It's one of their HGTV Home colors.

And, not that it really matters, but Lowes mixed both the sample AND the gallons based on their paint strips in their store (HGTV Home for Lowes or something...). SW store said they knew this was going to start happening once Lowes started selling a product with their name on it but using different tints. SW store told me if they were off like they were and they had mixed both, they would have given me free gallons. Actually, they even said that if Lowes had used SW tints, they would have given me free gallons from their store. They obviously stand behind their product and I will shop for paint directly from them in the future when looking for a SW color. I have not yet had a chance to speak to Lowes yet to see if anything can/will be done. (Like I said, I have never had a problem with Lowes in the past with paints....and its probably nothing they did 'wrong'....but yes, going to the SW source for their colors makes more sense.)

emmarene - that one on the bottom does look more bluish to me...which one is that? The hammered zinc?

Anyway - I'm almost afraid to try another gray at this point. Not sure what I'm going to wind up doing. Part of that is going to be determined what (if anything) Lowes offers to do.

Gray, though, is obviously a different story.

The thing to remember about gray is every color of gray belongs to a hue family - that's where it comes from. And you can find a gray from every hue family: red, yellow-red, yellow, green-yellow, green, blue-green, blue, purple-blue, purple, red-purple. Each hue family has colors of gray.

Some colors of gray are so close to a true neutral gray that it is very difficult to see any chroma/colorfulness in the color at all. So, it's hard to determine what hue family it belongs to.

But if you know that every color of gray belongs to a hue family, you're better equipped to figure out which one.

The best way to do that is to compare the swatches of gray to full color, saturated hue parent color chips. Hue parent is same as hue family in this case: ed, yellow-red, yellow, green-yellow, green, blue-green, blue, purple-blue, purple, red-purple.

As soon as you compare a gray chip to its hue parent, you'll see the resemblance.

Read this blog post, it might help: http://thelandofcolor.com/bringing-perspective-to-color-undertone/

I'm wondering where you found this hue info from SW. Can you find the Hammered Zinc? It's one of their HGTV Home colors.

No, not from SW. We do color notations here at The Land of Color. And I do not have Hammered Zinc because the HGTV Home colors is a newer color collection.

And the Lowe's SW partnerships is definitely a challenge because Lowe's doesn't use SW tints. So, there will no doubt be color match issues.

I painted a room sw dovetail, and I did not see any blue/purple in it at all. I did think it had a slight brown undertone, but noone else seems to think so.

Sorry for the late response. For the record the sample on bottom was Hammered Zinc.

I painted a room sw dovetail, and I did not see any blue/purple in it at all. I did think it had a slight brown undertone, but noone else seems to think so.

Well, it looks great! Perfectly fine that no one else agrees with how you perceive the color. Doesn't change the color reality of your room one bit.

But it does illustrate my point about the slippery slope, experiential nature of undertones rather nicely. There's no guaranteed rhyme or reason to approaching paint color (or color in general) from a perspective of undertones.

Just for grins Google Revere Pewter undertones. I've seen Revere Pewter called out as having pink, purple, blue, brown and even gray undertones.

The person who said it has pink undertones thinks she's 100% correct.

The person who said it has purple undertones thinks SHE'S 100% correct.

And so on.

Truth is from a perceptual perspective they are all correct. Technically, however, they're wrong.