We often hear our clients say that they want grey paint on the walls, but they struggle to find the perfect grey color! Grey can often lean purple, blue, green, or pink depending on the light (natural and not) in the room, the colors around it (hot tip: paint swatches on your walls large and on a white background so your existing color doesn’t interfere!), and the shade of grey that is chosen. This is why it can be hard to find a good grey color that won’t change its identity when you put it on the wall! Fear not, we are here to give a guiding hand.
Grey Exterior of Our Iconic Mid Mod Interior Project
We should start off by saying that everyone’s eyes are different, so some people may pick up on subtle differences in color easier than other people, but in general, an easy way to see the slight differences in color is to compare them to other similar colors. This will often accentuate the undertones of the color you are considering.
In this post, we will be comparing three Dunn Edwards colors, DE6276 Silhouette, DET614 So Chic! (yes, the color’s name has an exclamation mark in it), and DEC786 Miners Dust. You might already be able to see the difference in their color by looking at them next to each other in the image below, but try holding a hand over two of the colors and you will see that all of them are medium grey. This technique of holding your hand over one version will be helpful throughout this entire post because your eyes are always adjusting for what colors they are seeing!
From that picture, you may be able to see that DE6276 Silhouette has green undertones and DEC786 Miners Dust has red undertones. The color So Chic! is a nice in-between because it doesn’t lean too heavily in one direction or the other. Let’s look at these colors with warm and cool color pallets to help illustrate why you want to consider the color pallet of your home and the undertones of your grey paint before making a final decision.
By surrounding DE6276 Silhouette and DEC786 Miners Dust with some of our favorite cool colored Dunn Edwards shades, you can see the cooler undertones in DE6276 Silhouette as it picks up the greens in its surrounding colors, and the warmth in DEC786 Miners Dust, which almost has a pink tone to it now.
Reversely, we can surround them with warm Dunn Edwards colors and, oh boy! You can really see why choosing DE6276 Silhouette for a grey wall color would be bad if you primarily had warm tones in your home. It really pulls out the green tones in DE6276 Silhouette, whereas DEC786 Miners Dust looks right at home.
DET614 So Chic! is the in-between color in this example, so if you have lots of warm and cool colors in the color scheme of your home, or if you have a very neutral color scheme with mostly whites, greys, and blacks, you will want to keep your grey color selection more neutral. You can see below how well DET614 So Chic! plays with all the colors!
We hope this helps you on your journey to finding the perfect grey paint color. Of course, if you need help, book a Discovery Call and learn more about our Color Consultation where we take the worry out of color selection and pick all your paint colors for you, complete with sample and a spec sheet with sheen levels for your painter!
XOXO,
