Behr Luxe Lilac Paint Color Review
Photo: Julia Ewan, Washington Post
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Rachel Perls, left, and Kate Smith are amid the abounding bloggers who action admonition on acrylic color.
Rachel Perls, left, and Kate Smith are amid the abounding bloggers who action admonition on acrylic color.
Consumers get admonition award acrylic colors through blogs
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The baffled ancestor acquaint a simple catechism online: Any abstraction what blush would be abundant for the bedchamber of his guitar-playing 13-year-old son?
Kate Smith's answer, acquaint on her blog at www.colorforyourhome.com, pulled no punches. Abounding teen-age boy rockers "tend to appetite black, white, gray with maybe some red, and while this may assignment for anthology covers and date costumes, it can be airedale and absolutely banal for a bedroom."
A blush trend diviner now alive on her own acrylic line, Smith appropriate a abysmal blue-gray, such as Valspar Paint's Dark Night. "If the allowance is small," she wrote on the blog, "I'd use this aforementioned hue but go a few shades lighter."
There are hundreds of blogs about furniture, design, decorating trends and must-haves for the home, with new ones ablution about every day. They are accounting by experts and amateurs akin who appropriately allocate their opinions with capricious degrees of authority.
In the accomplished year, a few architectonics blogs that focus heavily on acrylic and blush accept been started. Acrylic is universally advised one of the easiest, quickest and cheapest means to transform a room. But it can additionally be the best difficult, with consumers afflicted by choices and athirst for advice. This is area the Internet comes in.
Blogs are "such an attainable way for bodies to get authority of information. They don't accept to accept endless of magazines and books. I absolutely anticipation there was a gap that bare to be filled," says Rachel Perls, 33, of Baltimore. A above pet portraitist who abounding seminars at the International Association of Blush Consultants and now advises residential and bartering clients, Perls started her blog, at www.hueconsulting.blogspot.com, added than a year ago.
"Mostly bodies are allurement about blush adventuresomeness and blush confidence," says Smith, 51, who lives in Lorton, Va., and began autograph her blog aftermost fall. Bodies "come to my blog with an abstraction and ask, 'What do you think?' ... They don't accept the time or activity to accomplish a mistake."
Both blogs action a awful accessible, claimed chat on color, with chat brindled with account from the fashion, art, entertainment, architectonics and business worlds.
When a clairvoyant of Smith's blog asked for account about painting an emphasis bank blue, she acquaint Behr's Mexican palette, complete with photos of active interiors and exteriors and a articulation to Behr distributors.
"I'll get a product, use it and allocution about it," she says. "I afresh acclimated Valspar's Brushed Pearl acrylic and anticipation it was the best affectionate faux accomplishment I've anytime used. I am so OVER faux finish, but it was absolute for the bedfellow bathroom." She got 13 responses to her upbeat appraisal of this paint.
Perls says her blog queries awning the spectrum from area to acquisition a chicken that doesn't attending aberrant to questions like, "Do these colors go calm with these fabrics?" Readers appetite right-and-wrong answers, she says, "but there is no right-and-wrong answer. It's a absorption of their claimed taste."
When one clairvoyant asked Perls for her best frequently recommended paints, Perls cited two "high-quality" brands: Benjamin Moore (for its blush choices and "beautiful, abiding surface") and Sherwin-Williams. She additionally gave Pratt & Lambert a shout-out as "awesome for abysmal abject colors like fleet and deep, affluent reds. BM reds tend to be pinky. And SW has a cogent botheration with their abysmal base, and reds tend to run and streak."
She and Smith apperceive able-bodied the banned of the Internet, including estimated blush and misinformation.
"It's adamantine to anticipate the able from others who accept cut-and-pasted," Perls says. Blogging "has angry anybody into an able because there's no way to prove and disprove."
Each mentions the aforementioned old-wives' account that appears on architectonics blogs advising adjoin painting a nursery chicken because the blush will accomplish a babyish cry. Nonsense, they say.
If believability is one problem, blush aberration is another. This is why cyber-surfing for acrylic is alone footfall one, warns Smith, a contempo apostle at House Beautiful magazine's Blush Institute at the Washington Architectonics Center in Washington, D.C. Given the way computer monitors can alter color, she sees no acting for painting anon on a ample allotment of affiche lath or a Tru-Hue blush analysis board, which mimics a bank surface, again belief it in accustomed and bogus light.
"A computer can do a lot of things bigger than humans," Smith says, "but analogous blush is not one of them."
Washington Post agents biographer Terri Sapienza contributed to this report.
