Maroon is more of a red; agreeable gray is not an icy/blue gray, but a warm gray. In order to make a color look warm the mix will have warm tones like red, yellow, orange and the like and then of course the color(s) of everything else in the room also influence how it looks.

The pictures (on my computer monitor) you have with the ceiling fan light on make both the floor and the wall paint look much more gray, while the top image without the ceiling fan light on has the floor looking tan-ish-pinky-beige just like the wall paint. What kind of lightbulbs are in that ceiling fan? The cabinets in the first pic look darker and appear to have a bit more reddish tone than they do in the bottom one.

@jenn the lights are some sort of flourescent that came with the fan. The other light is still a warm yellow. Maybe I should switch out the ceiling fans lights to something less clinical and more warm. Or maybe the peach in the hallway is floating into the kitchen? do you think painting the cabinets white will tone down that pinky look? or should I just repaint with a deeper gray?

You can try a deeper gray, but I'm not convinced that painting the cabinets white will help tone down the pink tinge. honestly with the light on it looks gray (which I assume you want) but you probably don't want to leave the light on 24/7. :P

If you do repaint, do a primer coat so you're not just adding a new undertone to the pink-purple one there now and pick a gray without the pink-purple undertones - if you can bring a sample of your floor and a cabinet door, or one of the drawers into the paint place.

Didn't they save your color in their dispenser-computer?! We almost always at least ask if they want the color saved. Or....you can just take TWO cell-pics of your can:

* One of the TOP of the can, showing store color lable.

* Another of the ENTIRE front of can.

* This way eliminates MOST error sources if part-time help is present, or rushed, etc. They'll know (hopefully....) which EXACT Brand/base/sheen/formula/colorants to use.

>>>> The old phrase... "a picture is worth....." ;-)

>>>> Do this BEFORE paint slops onto it!!!!! I have many good reasons for saying these things! :-)

Faron

I just had my Master Bedroom Painted with SW Latte. Certain times of the day it goes from looking tan,like the card, and then changes to almost a sage color. I like the way it changes. I have SW Kilm Beige in my foyer and it goes from beige to gray depending upon the light. It may just be a matter of lighting in your room. It's always best to paint two coats on a foam board and look at it during various times of the day and on all walls to get a sense on how it really works in your room. Same goes for your color for your cabinets. Best of Luck!

Did you put a Color To Go sample on the walls to see if you liked it? If so, they are all low lustere and not flat. Can make a difference. (Light reflective value) I was a color consultant for SW and have a great deal of experience with these very issues. SW will surely make it right for you, paint cost wise, by reducing the price on the new order. I would HIGHLY recommend that you use a Color Consultant from Sherwin Williams. If you don't have one in your local area, find a designer. There are so many factors that play into the color chroma, saturation, etc, that you will be glad you asked for on site help.

Depending on how SW does their samples, I don't think it's actually PAINT. Therefore the base may not say the same thing.

ACE, Valspar, & C2 DO use ACTUAL PAINT, & the tint-bases, of the main paint. ACE/Valspar use Satin as the only sheen for the sample-pints. C2 uses Eggshell as their sample-pint sheen.

In the above lines I mentioned, you'll see the terms Ultra-White, Midtone, & Neutral in the C+K/ACE brand. Valspar uses Pure-White, Medium, & Neutral. These are used for the pints thru gallons, all sheens.

C2 uses "White, Midtone, & Accent" for their 3 tint-bases, pints thru gallons, all sheens.

If there's no tintbase name on your SAMPLE, then it's just a substance that holds colorants, MAY have a different formula for the sample, but APPLIES like paint.

>>>> I would just get QUARTS. That way, it's the actual PAINT. Check that the formula is the same as your final color tho'! Also.....check that it goes into the right SW LINE before tinting.

Faron

Just to make sure....by SW "Lines" I meant the same SW sub-brand, like Duration, etc.

Use those cell-pics!

Faron

i took both to sw and they say they mix it differently for the samples than they do for the finals and it is the same color. they say there is no error.

The Color to Go Jug formula not matching the formula on the quart or the gallon is more normal than not normal. Actually, I think it's the exception that the formulas DO match. Color to Go Jugs, btw, aren't "real paint" because per SW they "lack performance properties" and have to be top coated with actual paint.

There are 100 (ish) different ways to mix the same paint color using different combinations of the same set of colorants.

The formula doesn't matter - at all. The only thing that matters is what the color *IS* when it's dry.

the sample paint wasnt pink on my walls.

But when you compare - not on the walls - a swatch of the sample to a swatch of the paint, do they match? Do they match each other and most importantly --- do they match a chip of Agreeable Gray?

If so, they are all low lustere and not flat. Can make a difference. (Light reflective value)

The LRV, luminance, of a color has nothing to do with gloss level. The value doesn't shift matte to gloss any more dramatically than normal; normal meaning going from one target color sample to another target color sample of the same sheen. Gloss is measured separate from luminance.

The walls match the grey floor tiles under the yellow lights of the kitchen. But when I turn on my ceiling fan lights or the sun shines in, the bright lights showcase my paint as grayish pink.

This is text book metamerism. A pair of colors match under one light source but do not match under a different light source. Change the light and you change how the color looks - just how color works.

I'm not surprised it looks pink. It may be more accurate to describe it as overtones of blush, or peachy instead of pink.

Agreeable Gray belongs to the yellow hue family but when you look at where it "lives" on the color wheel below you can see that it's over close to the YR (orange) hue family. This is based on measuring the color in a controlled, balanced quality of light called D65. D65 looks like indirect daylight around noon.

So, totally makes sense you see the peachy-pink overtones when the sun shines in and under your ceiling fan lights which are apparently a more balanced light source than the yellower kitchen lights.

Bottom line, anything is possible but I'd be surprised if there was anything wrong with how either container of paint was mixed.

Everything you've experienced is normal (unfortunately). But the good news is you'll only make this kind of color mistake once. Next time, you'll know what to look for and how to look for it.

Possible solutions are you can try changing out the ceiling fan lights with warmer bulbs but that's not going to change how the color shifts in natural daylight.

Or, you can just live with it; odds are good the more you live with it, the less you'll notice the peachy-pink. You'll adapt. The more time that passes, the more you'll feel like the walls and floor blend seamlessly.

Or you can repaint with a color that doesn't "live" over so close to the orange hue family.

Adrienne, I can sympathize. I spent hours and hours looking for just the "right" gray as there are so many with green/blue/purple overtones that I don't like (I especially dislike the green undertones). I finally found Harbor Gray (BM) and told my painter. He indicated that he only dealt with Sherwin Williams but they could replicate any Benjamin Moore color exactly. My gut told me I should insist he obtain BM's Harbor Gray but he worked for me before and I trusted him. Anyway, this color was going in my open floor plan kitchen, great room and two story foyer. I left for work with my trusted painter setting up to paint and was utterly dismayed when I came home. What I believed would be a true gray looked almost olive green! He showed me the can sticker, which said Harbor Gray with some color variants (which made no sense to me) but it made no difference, it definitely wasn't BM's Harbor Gray. The long story short is I still have the olive on the walls because family, friends, neighbors love it. Despite this, husband agrees we should repaint. I've decided to wait until after the holidays and then will paint with BM's Harbor Gray. Oh well.....it's only paint.

Get that fan out of there and put in some proper lighting and then see waht it looks like.

I've decided to wait until after the holidays and then will paint with BM's Harbor Gray.

Harbor Gray belongs to the yellow hue family. It "lives" at the end of the yellow hue family over close to the green-yellow hue family. It's not a "true gray" - there is no such thing in architectural paints, actually. Harbor Gray inherently has greenish-yellow overtones and combined with the light you have to work with, it's not surprising that it looks olive.

Thank you Lori. Any recommendations for something that might be a true gray? Someone told me BM's Classic Gray might work but now I'm doubting any gray will look as I'd hoped.

French gray or light french gray, both are SW

Thanks for the paint info Jenn. Both are great and exactly what I'm looking for.

No problem - SW has them categorized as ‘standalone’, since they are by themselves in terms of paint chip color family undertone. :)

Paint companies don't organize their colors by "undertones" because that's not how color really works.

Which is a good thing. At least most of them have enough sense not to let that happen. Some brands like Dunn-Edwards do an outstanding job with their color information and include Munsell hue/value/chroma notations for their colors right in the fandeck index next to LRV.

As more and more people experience the inconsistency and chaos that comes with trying to categorize colors by undertones, I suspect you'll be seeing more paint brands following Dunn-Edwards' lead.

The concept of undertones is completely subjective; it's about individual color perception. For example, JudyG is experiencing Agreeable Gray as a beige with "red undertones". That's her opinion based on her color acuity, the context in which she's viewing the chip, and the light source illuminating the chip.

It's not a measured attribute of Agreeable Gray, it's just how she's choosing to describe how she sees Agreeable Gray in order to share her perception of the color with us. But it doesn't make "red undertones" a fact.

Unlike hue family notations. Hue family notations are an objective, measured attribute. They come directly from a color's DNA (dominant wavelength to be exact). Hue family is consistent and blissfully repeatable.

Classic French Gray and Light French Gray are no different. I don't know what the 'stand alone' thing is about but both belong to a hue family - because all colors belong to a hue family. It's just that super low chroma grays from the hue family neighborhoods these colors belong to are often perceived - under a range of different light sources - as "neutral" or "just gray".

But again, just because they are generally PERCEIVED that way, doesn't make it a universally applicable fact.

I'm going by what the guy at the local Sherwin Williams store told me, and French Gray/Light French Gray are the only two on their chip so it makes sense to me to call them 'standalone' colors.

I love Dunn Edwards, but they're not available where I am. The way their colors are organized made it so easy when I was choosing the paint color for our previous home in SoCal.

DE and California Paints are both regional brands. When you've had access and then don't, that hurts. Because then you know too much about how displays can be organized in a truly useful way. Kelly Moore apparently organizes everything in their stores - all the displays - by Munsell notation. I hear it's a sight to behold but I've never been to one of their stores.

The SW guy saying 'standalone' colors may have just been his way of saying what I said - that super low chroma grays from the hue family neighborhoods these colors belong to are often perceived as "neutral" or "just gray".

Except he summed it all up better than me.

Dunn Edwards is awesome, I wish they were nationwide. Would have had the painters use DE over SW if I had the opportunity to do so.

Lots to consider and such a good discussion. Yes, I agree, it would be useful for this info to be provided at the paint store as well. Who knew that color-to-go it wasn't "paint"!?

Double thumbs up to Lori for sharing a lot of good knowledge on color science.

Some of the regional paint companies will have their paint chips organized very similarly because they are part of a trade group that creates the chipsets for them. I'm not sure if Dunn-Edwards is in one of this organizations though.

Adrienne, I don't see any harm in trying to get the offending area repainted. It sounds to me like someone used the wrong formula, on that second color, or the database came up with a match and that second formula was used for some reason.

I have some insight into the paint side of this. There is a database of tint formulas for all of the colors on the chip racks, as well as a way to match color samples that the customer sends in. Humans usually check these databases to make sure the formulas make sense. The formulas are also optimized to use less expensive tints. 90% of the time, the customer wants some form of white, gray or beige, so the paint is typically tinted with some combination of black, red oxide, yellow oxide, or raw umber.

Magenta and gold/medium yellow is typically avoided if possible due to higher cost and lower durability (sadly, brighter organic pigments don't last as well as the oxides).

I chose Dunn Edwards Silver City for our previous home, it looked great with the carpet and LVP. We were able to sell quickly above asking so it worked out well.

Still, I found myself wishing that I'd gone a touch darker for the gray, something I wouldn't have realized until I had lived with the light gray for a bit (the mister defers to my preferences when it comes to home stuff...furniture, floors, paint, window treatments - as long as I'm happy he's happy. :P) In our new home I was able to pick my gray paint again and this time around I knew that I didn't want to go too light or too dark. Light french gray was the right choice for our home. It was also kind of the only choice that wasn't too greige and wasn't too blue (though I like gray with a hint of blue, those are not as neutral a gray as I felt was needed in order to be paired with heritage cherry wood furniture and cherry wood cabinets.)

Actual experience with my local SW supplier. My crew painted the new baseboards in the garage (we are talking a whole house worth). When the time came to mount the boards it was discovered that SW had mixed the last gallon incorrectly...so those boards didn't match AT ALL. Yep, all the "info" on the cans was the same, the paint in them was not. Worse yet, all the window trim in the office (scaffold required) was done with the "off color" paint. SW admitted the color was wrong and said they would replace the paint but wouldn't pay for the labor. As a result SW will get none of my further business.

Lamp Black is in many grays. All by itself, it goes to a very cold blue gray. To soften the blueish look, a form of yellow, most often yellow oxide, is often introduced. However, this can result in the gray starting to look greenish. This is why some form of red is introduced to counter the green. this would explain your Lamp Black, deep gold and maroon formula.

Behr too sometimes varies the formula between the sample jar size and the larger paint sizes. This seems counter-intuitive to me, but as long as they both match, I see no problem. It is possible to use different formulas, and still arrive at the same end color. My machines have a green tint in them, and also blue and yellows. Why the machine decides to blend blue and yellow or use the stock green is unknown to me, but I don't really care so long as the final product is true to the sample.