i agree, the warmer matte white is a better fit for a room you actually want to live in. the glossy pure white makes it feel like a basement room.
The wall is almost certainly already some variation of Swiss coffee, which is like a drop of black and two drops of umber per gallon… juuuuust enough to give it a little color.
When I used to help people pick colors the primary advice I gave them was that once it’s on the wall you will never see the difference between the four shades of [color] you’re looking at because at scale your brain blends it in with the lighting and ambient color of the rest of the room.
Sheen makes more of a difference, and the answer is always satin/eggshell for living spaces and gloss for kitchens and bathrooms (because it’s more moisture resistant and washable). Flat can go fuck itself, it only exists as a cheap option for track homes who don’t care about your paint looking good for more than six months.
Source: worked at a paint store for several years, did a loooot of color matching by eye.
I had no idea the builder we had was going to use flat inside. I fucking hate it, the patches we’ve painted over with THE EXACT same paint never match because we are brushing it on and not spraying.
We added onto our house and our contractor suggested flat and I vetoed it. Eggshell at minimum, please! I don’t do trendy. So happy to have insisted.
All of our trim is in Swiss Coffee though, lol. The funny thing is, I’d much rather have dark wood trim but that would cost a fortune. Maybe someday I’ll improve my DIY skills enough and do it myself.
You don’t think flat is good for ceilings?
(Also I think some people do really care about the difference between the shades but they’re not the ones who need help picking one out.)
Sorry, not who you responded to, but flat is great on ceilings everywhere but a kitchen. There’s always a chance food gets splashed on the ceilings in a kitchen so it’s best to use semi-gloss or better so you can clean it.
I do semi-gloss in my bathrooms as well to keep moisture out of the walls as much as possible.
Flat in living areas is best in my opinion though for light refraction. Softer and more light gets refracted all around the room instead of just reflected straight from the light source.
If you have kids or pets, or just have a tendency to be a clumsy person yourself, then glossy is much better from a practical standpoint. So much easier to clean with less risk of rubbing the paint off the wall. To be fair, I don’t have much of an eye for style so it suits me just fine.
Now let’s see Paul Allen’s wall.
Most humans are trichromats which means they possess 3 independent channels for conveying color information, derived from the 3 different types of cone cells in the eye.
Tetrachromats have 4 independent channels for conveying color information, derived from 4 different types of cone cells in the eye. This lets them see a larger color space than trichromats.
Maybe your wife is a tetrachromat.
Funnily enough there’s actually sexual dimorphism in human vision. While studies about exactly how different the structure of the eye is and how it might differ from an assumed objective commonalities is still not conclusive it’s thought Female phenotypic people supposedly do tend to have higher color differentiation on average and are better at recognition of static objects while Male phenotypic people have better night vision and ability to interpret objects in motion.
So a guy holding up two paint swatches they can’t tell the difference in and being confused is basically a cross cultural phenomenon.
It’s not necessarily sexual dimorphism. It could be gender dimorphism, as supported by the findings that colour differentiation depends on linguistics.
Yeah but printers are optimized for trichromats and these color swatches are printed, so they should look the same to a tetrachromat as everyone else.
Which gives makes me feel bad for them cause all printed media, and any TV, monitor, or phone display that can’t do 1000+ nit HDR must look very dull and unrealistic to a tetrachromat. Hell, even HDR 400 (the minimum standard) in of itself is still a relatively niche feature, let alone HDR 1000+.
They’re clearly different, even under the bad lightning.
The wall is made using a very brightly white plaster.
On the other hand your sample is more muted drawing a bit toward some sort of warm brown.
Some better lighting would help, for sure. OP’s wife is clearly trying to use gaslighting, and it’s just not working.