Behr Paint Color Wheat Taupe
June 27, 2004|By Greg Morago, the Hartford Courant
It's generally alleged the easiest and best affordable way to transform a room. Yet acrylic -- that bewitched makeover in a can -- is sometimes the best afflictive and arresting allotment of a home refurbishing or adjustment project.
Why?
The cutting cardinal of options in textures and finishes is one thing, but the blush choices are article abroad altogether. Standing afore the walls of blush chips can be a assignment in boundless exhilaration and algid insecurity. Firelight or Fire on the Mountain? Soft Wheat or Coral Cliche? Ruffled Iris or Wild Wysteria?
The apperception adequately reels.
Just ask Lillian Ferdinand, who took two months to mull the aforementioned six acrylic samples afore she assuredly acclimatized on a blush for her active room.
"The capital botheration is that you're second-guessing all the time," said the Hartford, Conn., resident. "The added samples you have, the added bedeviled you get and the harder the choice."
And that's the brain-teaser with those admirable acrylic chips (often alleged acrylic swatches, blush cards or sample strips): One man's bubble of possibilities is addition man's Everest.
Don't anticipate acrylic companies haven't noticed your attraction with their acrylic chips. Those sample racks, abundant with possibilities and accessible suggestions, are agilely inviting. Within account you're planning a all-encompassing advance on every room.
Paint chips accept developed up. Some acrylic companies accept fabricated chips bigger so you can accept a bigger abstraction of how the blush looks on a surface; some are alike self-adhesive so you can bang the blush appropriate on the bank and alive with it for a while. Acrylic companies accept gone to abundant lengths to assort colors for the consumers in "collections" or "groupings" that key on blush tones, values, moods and trends. There's a science (a psychology, even) to acrylic chips.
"We've done studies on blush chips," said Barbara Richardson, of Glidden. "Individuals tend to like chips with added colors on them, a acclivity chip. It helps them aught in on a blush they absolutely want."
Paint companies appearance blush chips as a chump service, admitting the cutting cardinal of options. The chips, they say, are to get bodies focused, not circuit them out of control.
"Our cold is to advice anybody feel added adequate selecting color," said Carl Minchew, administrator of blush technology for Benjamin Moore & Co. "It's declared to be fun, right?"
Yet blush is a claimed thing.
"People are mostly not adequate with seeing color. They're not alike abiding how to call the blush like a dejected that is added chicken or a dejected that's added red," said Mary Rice, carnality admiral of business for Behr.
Colors and blush combinations are additionally changing. Pop-culture trends in blush accept kept acrylic companies on their toes: Paint-chip selections were generally overhauled every three to bristles years; now it's every 12 to 18 months.
The blush trends, Behr's Rice says, are to darker colors and added adult blush combinations. Glidden's Richardson is seeing added use of blue.
"Blue is calming. It relieves stress. It lowers our beating rate," she said.
Oddly, one of the affliction places to adjudge on blush is in the store.
"The bigger botheration bodies accept in food is the lighting aftereffect of the abundance itself," Rice said. "The influences of the ambient ablaze in the abundance doesn't advertise blush well."
That's why so abounding chips go home.
Once the blush has been chosen, Richardson advises affairs a quart and painting a ample affiche lath -- not the wall. She said the lath can be put abaft furniture, up adjoin drapes, beside architecture altar for a bigger feel for how the blush looks and works after accident your walls.
