Almost every color regret I have watched happen started the same way. Somebody held a chip up against the wall in a store, liked it and bought three gallons. The color was fine. The conditions were the problem. A paint chip is a two-inch square printed on paper, lit by fluorescent light, surrounded by forty other colors. Your wall is two hundred square feet lit by a west window at four in the afternoon, next to oak floors, across from a sofa. Those are not remotely the same test, and the color you liked is going to behave differently in the second one. Three things move a color once it is on a wall. The first is orientation. North-facing rooms get cool, indirect light all day, which pushes grays toward blue and can make a warm white look slightly dirty. South and west rooms get warm light that amplifies yellow and can turn a soft beige into something closer to butter by evening. The second is everything else in the room. Floors, cabinets, brick and even a large rug throw color back onto the walls, which is why the same white reads differently in a room with red oak than in one with white oak. The third is sheen, which changes how much light bounces and can make one color look like two. There is also a number worth knowing. Light reflectance value, usually printed on the back of the chip. It tells you how much light a color returns on a scale of zero to one hundred. It is the most useful thing on that card and almost nobody uses it. Two colors that look nearly identical on paper can sit ten points apart, and in a dim room that gap is the difference between cozy and cave. So test properly. Buy samples rather than trusting chips, paint them large and put them on at least two walls facing different directions. Leave them up for a few days and look in the morning, at dusk and at night under your own lamps, since that last one is when you actually live in the room. I will admit I have been overruled on color by clients more than once and been wrong about it every time. The chip is not the enemy. It is just a very small piece of evidence about a very large surface, and it is being asked to do a job it was never designed for.
Ashish Bajpa is the owner of Elite Finishes — Painting & Decorative Finishes