“With color one obtains an energy that seems to stem from witchcraft.”
-Henri Matisse
As a designer, I’ve helped clients select paint colors for almost 15 years, and I’ve seen firsthand the tortured struggle that many homeowners face trying to pick the perfect shade to complement their decorating vision.
I’ve seen vast patchworks of test colors spanning walls, towers of paint cans stacked like mini skyscrapers in the garage and the anguished look of frustration on panicked faces when I’ve been called in as a last resort, just days (sometimes even hours) before the crew is scheduled to start rolling paint.
The most common lament? “I just don’t want to make a mistake.”
And I understand. I’ve seen lots of mistakes. From garish highlighter yellow walls, to insipid sickly greens, to dingy browns and everything in between. A bad paint color choice can kill a room faster than just about anything else. And while I encouragingly tell my clients that there are many ways to get it right, I admit that I neglect to tell them that there are just as many ways to screw it up. I justify my well-intentioned omission with the firm belief that people tend to make their best choices when they’re feeling relaxed and confident.
While I could offer up a plethora of tips for picking specific shades, color trends, testing paint and the like, I want to begin by offering some advice based in the idea that we all have a color personality — and one that goes well beyond any personal identification with a favorite color.
Color Personality: Introverts and Extroverts
Learn to gauge your appetite for color in your environment. Most people, for example, can readily name favorite colors and what rooms they’d like to use them in. But what they often fail to recognize is just how impactful they want that color statement to be.
I find many homeowners are unsatisfied with their color selections after essentially overdosing (or underdosing) on the intensity. There’s an interesting physiologically based personality test called the lemon drop test. The basic idea is that introverts produce a greater amount of saliva than extroverts when lemon juice is placed on their tongue because they have a higher level of reactivity in a part of their brain that responds to food and social stimuli.
This explains why extroverts find intense social interactions invigorating, while introverts find them overwhelming. The same may well hold true for color stimuli, with introverts feeling overstimulated in intensely colored environments, and extroverts feeling energized by them.
While I don’t carry a vial of lemon juice into clients’ homes, it’s certainly food for thought — at the very least, take note of how you feel in intensely colored spaces. And take those reactions into account when selecting colors for your home.
What’s in a Color?
Understanding the properties of color is essential when making selections based on your color personality. They are as follows:
- Hue: Color tone and its accompanying warm or cool undertone (terracotta vs. magenta)
- Value: Relative lightness and darkness of a particular shade (lavender vs. eggplant)
- Saturation: Color intensity from grayed tones to the purest version of a color (sapphire vs. slate)
Intense colors tend to be warmer, darker and/or more saturated. If you like a paint color, but find it’s a little “too much” all over the walls, try desaturating, lightening up the tone or cooling down the undertone.
Colors in Combination
Other factors that affect the perception of color intensity emerge when we consider colors in relation to one another. Color relationships are represented by their arrangement around the color wheel. Hues adjacent to one another on the wheel are called analogous (ex. red, orange and yellow), while colors directly across the wheel are called complementary. The complement pairs are green and red, blue and orange, and yellow and purple.
Complementary colors have the effect of appearing to intensify each other, while analogous color combinations are more soothing. For example, blue will tend to look more vibrant with orange, and less intense next to green or purple.
Contrast, or the perceived degree of difference between hues, is incredibly important in determining the overall impact of a color scheme. The relationship of the colors around the color wheel is one contributing factor to contrast, but so are differences in lightness and brightness.
You can manipulate either or both of these factors to influence contrast. Varying shades of color in a monochromatic color scheme (e.g., all blues ranging from sky blue to navy blue), for example, can create tremendous contrast in a space despite the similarities among the hues (they are all blues).
Color Strategy — Color in Design
Not to be confused with a color scheme or palette, a color strategy speaks to the deliberate selection of colors taking individual aesthetics and personality into account and their purposeful placement in a space for an intended effect.
If all this seems a little theoretical, it actually has very practical implications. Here’s how you might specifically put these concepts to use when designing a room.
If you’re a color introvert, your color strategy to use blue might be to:
- Paint your walls a pale icy blue — but tone it down with a touch of gray so it doesn’t end up looking like a nursery.
- Select an even lighter shade for the ceiling to reduce its contrast with the walls and create an even more serene environment (besides, painted ceilings are awesome).
- Surround blue with shades of jade or lilac for a calming analygous color scheme.
- Reserve more vivid blues for jewel tone pops of color in art and accessories
If you’re a color extrovert, your color strategy to use blue might be to:
- Use navy or peacock blue for paint or other larger design elements, making sure you have sufficient natural and artificial light to prevent things from looking muddy.
- Consider brighter cobalt blue for drapery fabrics, rugs and other larger items.
- Pair blue with its orange complement to amp up the impact — but beware of limits to this strategy for other color combinations — for example, avoid pairing saturated reds and greens, unless you’re a big fan of a year-round Christmas theme.
- Punch up the contrast level for greater drama by setting off indigo walls with a glossy white floor and metallic accents.
The Bottom Line
When it comes to selecting color for your home, don’t blindly follow trends or emulate what you see in shelter magazines. If you design to your own taste and color personality, you can walk in the door at the end of the day into your own personal retreat — a space that lifts and rejuvenates your spirit and inspires you to live your best possible life. In the end, the right design decisions are always the ones that are right for you.
