Thought I knew paint mixing until I tried to match Behr to Sherwin Williams

I spent three hours at the hardware store last Saturday trying to match a custom blue from a Behr sample to a Sherwin Williams can. The guy at the counter said it would be close enough. Well, I got home, painted one wall in my living room, and it came out looking like baby blue instead of the deep navy I wanted. Turns out the pigments in those two brands are totally different, so you can't just swap formulas. I even paid $48 for that quart and now I gotta start over. Why don't they just use the same base colors across brands? Has anyone else run into this matching nightmare with paint?

3 comments

3 Comments

wren97811d agoMost Upvoted

My buddy tried the scanner match at Lowe's with a faded olive green from his old Benjamin Moore can and the machine gave him this weird swampy brown instead. He ended up bringing the actual paint chip to a small local shop where the guy just mixed it by feel with a few test patches on cardboard. Took three tries but it came out perfect, and the guy told him every brand's base tint is like a different language so you gotta treat them like separate countries.

william81611d ago

Funny enough, I went through this exact mess with a gray. Ended up taking a chip from the Behr can straight to the Sherwin Williams counter and had them eyeball it with their color matching scanner. They got super close but still had to tweak it by adding a few drops of black tint. That $48 hurts, but maybe take your paint chip back to SW and ask them to match it by eye not by formula. They can usually dial it in with a couple test dabs.

jason95811d ago

That "by eye not by formula" part is the key, absolutely. But here's what I've always wondered about this approach: how many times can a person actually eyeball it before they mess up the batch? Like if you go back for a second gallon, are they just guessing from memory or do they keep your custom mix on file? I had a buddy who tried this and the first quart was perfect but the second one came out slightly darker. The store clerk swore they used the same amount of black but who knows. Did they offer to keep your custom formula saved in their system so you can get a perfect match next time?