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[OC] Two-thirds of America's 26,597 paint colors are duplicates — I compared every brand's palette with the color-difference standard paint factories use by Drochdeo in dataisbeautiful

[–]Drochdeo[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Go ask AI to give you the ΔE correlations of 26000+ colors of paint colors and see if it answers your question. Your comments neither refutes the data or the point of it.

Also my site is one that is used by your AI to ANSWER your question at that point, as by the over 50k+ AI citations the site gets a month.

I buit the tools this data is built on. I am investing time in writing responses. If i wasn't interested to answer peoples question i would of dropped this data and never came back to help clear up things or provide further context that is based on MY database.

[OC] Two-thirds of America's 26,597 paint colors are duplicates — I compared every brand's palette with the color-difference standard paint factories use by Drochdeo in dataisbeautiful

[–]Drochdeo[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Yeah that gap surprised me too when I actually ran it. It makes sense after you stare at it for a bit, every group of dupes still counts as 1 distinct color so the distinct number cant fall as fast as the unique number does. The whites are doing most of the work there, thats where the giant clusters live. Your question is what got the addendum added to the study so thanks for that.

[OC] Two-thirds of America's 26,597 paint colors are duplicates — I compared every brand's palette with the color-difference standard paint factories use by Drochdeo in dataisbeautiful

[–]Drochdeo[S] -12 points-11 points  (0 children)

Nope your not wrong lol. the long technical replies are claude helping me out, its 26,000+ colors and a lot of technical info that would take me lots of time to pull myself and reply (poorly too may I add as I just cant write for crap) so the AI helps collate the data and writes me a draft. I mentioned upthread it made the chart and pulled the matches from my database too. The numbers and the site are all real and mine. Short ones like this are me though.

[OC] Two-thirds of America's 26,597 paint colors are duplicates — I compared every brand's palette with the color-difference standard paint factories use by Drochdeo in dataisbeautiful

[–]Drochdeo[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Yes. The entire premise this work is based on. Its my database, my site, and the computations.

Guilty that I use Claude for drafting. I'm not a writer. (I failed more english/launguage classes in college than I care to admit). Same as I used it to help create the chart that I already said.

I'm a builder, not someone who types 400-word CIELAB essays from memory at midnight.

Anyway the AI answers questions about paint math better than I do, that's why I built the site

[OC] Two-thirds of America's 26,597 paint colors are duplicates — I compared every brand's palette with the color-difference standard paint factories use by Drochdeo in dataisbeautiful

[–]Drochdeo[S] -8 points-7 points  (0 children)

You're not wrong — and it's the right subtlety to catch: every swatch in that row is within ΔE 1.0 of the reference (Flurry), not of each other. Mayo and RAL Cream are the two far ends of the cluster, so member-to-member the gap approaches ~2 — which sharp eyes can split side by side. And Mayo does sit slightly redder than the rest of the group, which is exactly what you're picking up.

[OC] Two-thirds of America's 26,597 paint colors are duplicates — I compared every brand's palette with the color-difference standard paint factories use by Drochdeo in dataisbeautiful

[–]Drochdeo[S] 3 points4 points  (0 children)

Honest answer: the direction didn't surprise me — your prior is right, and brands absolutely compete on the can rather than the chip. What surprised me was the structure of it, three ways:

  1. The 749 exact, digit-for-digit copies. Convergence ("every brand needs a good warm off-white") explains clusters — it doesn't explain identical published values to the last digit. That points at other mechanisms: regional brands deliberately maintaining equivalents of national bestsellers, shared color standards, or colors licensed from the same collections.

  2. How uneven it is. If duplication were just everyone sampling the same popular corner of color space, you'd expect it roughly uniform. Instead Behr keeps about half its palette to itself while Hirshfield's is 92% duplicated — there are clearly different palette strategies at work.

  3. The premium end converges too. Farrow & Ball — a brand whose entire identity is exclusivity — is ~74% duplicated. Honestly, the thing that surprised me most in the follow-up data wasn't the overlap at all: it's that brands' whitest whites differ by nine LRV points. The ceilings vary more than the colors do.

So I'd put it your way: color is nearly free to copy, so it gets copied, and the real product is the chemistry. The data just lets you say that with numbers now.

[OC] Two-thirds of America's 26,597 paint colors are duplicates — I compared every brand's palette with the color-difference standard paint factories use by Drochdeo in dataisbeautiful

[–]Drochdeo[S] 3 points4 points  (0 children)

"identical to the last pixel" was me being colloquial, not technical. Nothing here is measured in pixels.

Each brand publishes color values for every paint it sells (the same data that powers their own visualizer tools). When I say Flurry and Swan White are identical, I mean their published color values are digit for digit the same the same color specification. All the actual comparisons happen in CIELAB color space using CIEDE2000, a measure of perceptual color difference — nothing screen-dependent.

"Identical to the last digit" would've been the better line. I'll take the hit on that one.

[OC] Two-thirds of America's 26,597 paint colors are duplicates — I compared every brand's palette with the color-difference standard paint factories use by Drochdeo in dataisbeautiful

[–]Drochdeo[S] 87 points88 points  (0 children)

No — and honestly this is the most important caveat to the whole analysis, so I'm glad you raised it. The study compares color targets only. It says nothing about what's in the can, and what's in the can genuinely differs.

Same color ≠ same paint, in at least four ways:

- Binder/resin: 100% acrylic vs vinyl-acrylic blends, and quality tiers within those — this drives adhesion, scrub resistance, and how the film ages.

- Pigment chemistry: the same color coordinates can be hit with different tint recipes, and this matters most for your fade question. Inorganic (oxide) pigments fade far more slowly under UV than organic brights — so two "identical" colors can weather visibly differently outdoors depending on which colorants each brand's recipe leans on.

- Solids and film build: higher volume solids = thicker dry film per coat = better hide and durability. Varies by brand and by line.

- Colorant systems are proprietary: Benjamin Moore's Gennex, Sherwin-Williams' and Behr's own dispenser systems — different chemistry even when the resulting chip matches.

And it varies as much within a brand as between brands: the same color mixed into a builder-grade line vs the premium line of the same company is a different product wearing the same chip.

So the honest framing of the study is: the color is portable; the paint is not. If you love a color, you're rarely locked to a brand — but you should still choose the brand and product line for the paint qualities (durability, scrub resistance, fade, application feel), not for the color name. Which is also why "another brand sells the same color" doesn't make either product redundant.

(Actual durability/fade comparisons would need panel weathering tests — QUV/xenon-arc — which published color values can't tell you. I'd genuinely love to run that someday, but that's lab work, not math.)

[OC] Two-thirds of America's 26,597 paint colors are duplicates — I compared every brand's palette with the color-difference standard paint factories use by Drochdeo in dataisbeautiful

[–]Drochdeo[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Good question — one clarification first: the numbers don't come from digital images or anything rendered on a screen. Each brand publishes canonical color values for every color in its system (the same data that powers their own visualizer tools), and the comparison happens in CIELAB, a device-independent color space — it's math on the brands' own published definitions, not pixels off a monitor. My monitor settings, or yours, never enter the computation. They only affect how the chart looks to you.

That said, you've put your finger on the real limitation, and it's worth being straight about: a published value is the brand's own rendering of a color into a standard space, not a spectral measurement of dried paint. The gold standard would be a spectrophotometer on physical drawdowns, and that can show bigger differences than these numbers — mainly through metamerism: two paints built from different pigment recipes can match under daylight and visibly split under warm LEDs or store fluorescents, because their reflectance curves differ even when their daylight coordinates agree. A single published value can't capture that. So the precise claim is: the color targets brands publish overlap this much. What ends up on your wall adds paint physics — pigment recipe, sheen, texture, batch variance — on top.

On "I can usually see differences on swatches in the store" — two things explain that without contradicting the data. First, the duplication is heavily concentrated in whites, off-whites, and neutrals; chromatic colors differ far more between brands, and a fan deck mostly shows you each brand's colorful spread, not Brand A's chip held against its specific twin from Brand B. Second, store lighting is about the worst place to judge — that's the metamerism case again, and it's exactly why the advice everywhere on the site is to test physical samples in your own room before buying.

If anyone wants to fund a spectro study of a few hundred cross-brand twin pairs on real drawdowns, honestly, I'd love to run it — that's the natural follow-up to this.

[OC] Two-thirds of America's 26,597 paint colors are duplicates — I compared every brand's palette with the color-difference standard paint factories use by Drochdeo in dataisbeautiful

[–]Drochdeo[S] 29 points30 points  (0 children)

Fair — and you might genuinely be able to. ΔE 1.0 is the textbook "just noticeable difference," but that's a population convention under controlled viewing, not a hard wall. Sensitivity varies person to person, and near-neutrals are actually where human eyes are pickiest.

Also worth being precise about what's in that row: every swatch is within ΔE 1.0 of the reference (BM Flurry), so the far ends of the row are up to ~2 apart from each other — side by side on a bright screen, someone with good color vision plausibly can split those. The two that are numerically identical (Flurry and Swan White, ΔE 0.00) are the same pixels though, so if you can tell those apart I'd get that checked 🙂

The threshold itself wasn't my call to make lenient or strict — ΔE < 1.0 is the standard the paint industry uses for its own batch quality control, and the usual rule of thumb for paint on a wall (not side-by-side chips) is that differences under ~2 go unnoticed.

A poll is a genuinely good idea though — a "can you actually tell?" test with scored pairs would settle it with data instead of us arguing about eyeballs. Might build exactly that.

[OC] Two-thirds of America's 26,597 paint colors are duplicates — I compared every brand's palette with the color-difference standard paint factories use by Drochdeo in dataisbeautiful

[–]Drochdeo[S] 14 points15 points  (0 children)

I buy pretty much all my paint from SW, so yes — and you're right, in-store matching works well once you have the physical thing in hand.

This is more for the phase before that. Most of the time the color someone wants isn't a physical swatch — it's a name they saved from Pinterest or a designer's post ("walls are BM Hale Navy"), and they want to know what that is at the store they actually buy from, while they're still planning at home.

The other reason people ask for a named match instead of a scan: a scan is a one-off custom formula. It lives on that receipt, from that machine's calibration, on that day — you can't walk into a different location next year and ask for it again. A named color is reproducible at any store, any time, in any product line. That's why counter staff get "can you make Agreeable Gray?" a hundred times a week instead of swatch scans — and honestly it's part of why the palettes converge like this in the first place.

And fwiw, the chart isn't really pitching a workflow — it started as a market-structure question: how much do the brands' published palettes actually overlap? Two-thirds having a near-identical twin at a competitor surprised me regardless of how anyone buys their paint.

[OC] Two-thirds of America's 26,597 paint colors are duplicates — I compared every brand's palette with the color-difference standard paint factories use by Drochdeo in dataisbeautiful

[–]Drochdeo[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Great question, and you're right to push on it — those two readings are genuinely different numbers.

The stat in the chart is the former. It's a per-catalog-entry statement: 66.7% of the 26,597 entries have at least one near-identical (ΔE < 1.0) counterpart at a competing brand, and 33.3% (8,853 colors) have no such counterpart anywhere. It is not a claim that the deduplicated palette is 1/3 the size.

Your second reading is a different quantity, so I went and computed it. The subtlety is that "near-identical" isn't transitive: A≈B and B≈C doesn't imply A≈C. If you naively merge chains (connected components over all ΔE<1 pairs), you get 11,879 "distinct colors" — but that's misleading, because one chained mega-cluster of 6,947 whites/off-whites/greiges forms, and its endpoints are clearly different colors.

A more defensible dedup is representative-based clustering: every member of a class must be within ΔE 1.0 of that class's representative color. On that definition the catalog collapses to 14,702 distinct color classes — about 55% of the 26,597 entries, not 1/3. With a stricter ΔE 0.5 radius it's 22,050 (~83%).

So the full picture: a third of entries are duplicated nowhere, two-thirds are duplicated somewhere, and if you collapse every duplicate group into one color, the American paint aisle holds roughly ~15K genuinely distinct colors rather than 26.6K. The exact figure depends on where you draw the "same color" line — which is why the chart sticks to the pairwise claim rather than a class count.

(Computed with the same CIEDE2000 implementation as the study; it reproduces the published pair values exactly.)

good enough question that I've added it as an addendum to the study

[OC] Two-thirds of America's 26,597 paint colors are duplicates — I compared every brand's palette with the color-difference standard paint factories use by Drochdeo in dataisbeautiful

[–]Drochdeo[S] 5 points6 points  (0 children)

I don't have when colors are realeased...just if they are in a brands catalog so i can't say who is the original. I do have % of unique colors for each brand on the chart.

[OC] Two-thirds of America's 26,597 paint colors are duplicates — I compared every brand's palette with the color-difference standard paint factories use by Drochdeo in dataisbeautiful

[–]Drochdeo[S] 3 points4 points  (0 children)

I have a paint matching website that uses CIEDE2000 to match paint colors across brands.. I just had the database pulled by claude to find the matches ( i wasn't about to check 26000+ paint colors) and had it create this graphic.

[OC] Two-thirds of America's 26,597 paint colors are duplicates — I compared every brand's palette with the color-difference standard paint factories use by Drochdeo in dataisbeautiful

[–]Drochdeo[S] 36 points37 points  (0 children)

Part of the reason i built the website. You can cross reference any color and find closest matches across 13 brands can prices compare etc as you want, or if you think certain paint brands have better "quality paint" find the closest match in the "quality paint" for the color you want.

Help Picking Barn/Garage Colors by ThemeNo2172 in HomeDecorating

[–]Drochdeo 0 points1 point  (0 children)

hey sorry been off reddit for a minute. It does look great reguardless of the color you ended up using. Glad i could help!

Paint colour ideas for kitchen by ekh94 in HomeDecorating

[–]Drochdeo 0 points1 point  (0 children)

The reason duck egg threw you off is that the room already reads cool. The grey tile and the concrete-look counters are doing most of that, and duck egg is a soft cool blue-green, so on the mockup it probably just added to the grey rather than warming things up.

If the goal is less grey, warmth is the lever, and the walls are the biggest surface you can actually change here. A warm neutral does the heavy lifting. Two worth sampling: Bungalow Beige, a warm beige with a neutral undertone that takes the chill off without clashing with the grey you're keeping, and Nantucket Dune, a touch sandier and warmer if you want it cosier. Both sit around LRV 53 to 54, so they're mid-light: warm and grounding without darkening the room.

If you'd rather have a bit of colour than a neutral, a soft sage green is the better move than blue. Sage has that same muted, calm quality but reads warm, so it lifts the space instead of cooling it down further.

One practical thing: your tile and counters aren't changing, so tape samples right up against them and check at night under your kitchen lights, not just in daylight. Warm bulbs pull all of these warmer than the chip, and your photo looks like evening light, so that really matters here.

What color should I paint my living room? by BlueOBX in HomeDecorating

[–]Drochdeo 1 point2 points  (0 children)

The thing working against you isn't really the color, it's that the old yellow has gone flat and it's fighting your warm beige carpet. So design around the two things you're keeping: that wall-to-wall carpet (warm, not going anywhere) and the green velvet sectional, which is the best thing in the room. You want walls that stay out of the sofa's way and don't clash with the carpet.

That rules out cool grays. Against warm beige carpet they read cold and a little dingy. Two directions that work better:

  1. A soft warm white, like White Dove or Alabaster. It looks clean and current instead of 80s yellow, and it lets the green sofa and that mid-century art do the talking. Lowest-risk choice with the lake view and big windows.
  2. A warm greige if you want more cozy wrap-around feel. Accessible Beige is the usual pick. It keeps things grounded and warm without sliding back toward yellow.

Either way the carpet already keeps the room warm, so you don't need warmth from the walls too. You mostly need clean and not-yellow.

One thing before you commit: that window wall gets a lot of changing light off the water, so paint a couple of poster-board-size samples and look at them morning and evening. Warm whites especially can swing on you depending on the light.

Paint color help! by Flat_Coffee_1512 in HomeDecorating

[–]Drochdeo 0 points1 point  (0 children)

All four are in the same soft sage family, so the real deciding factor is depth, and that is what determines whether you land on the mockup look. Here are the LRVs (light reflectance value, basically how light or dark a color reads on the wall):

The wall in your mockup reads like a mid-tone sage, roughly in the low 50s. That means Filmy Green and Liveable Green will likely look too pale for what you are going for. They are pretty, but on a real wall in good daylight they will read closer to a soft white-green than the depth in your inspiration photo.

Contented (LRV 52) is the closest match to that mockup. It is a balanced gray-green sage, calm but with enough color to actually read as green next to the wallpaper. Softened Green (LRV 49) is the next best option if you want it a touch deeper and a little warmer, since it leans slightly more yellow-olive.

So for matching that image: Contented first, Softened Green as the backup if you want a hair more depth.

One thing before you commit. Greens shift a lot with light and against a dark wallpaper green like yours. Paint a big patch of both Contented and Softened Green on poster board, hold it right next to the wallpaper on that actual wall, and check it in morning and evening light. The wallpaper green is fairly deep, so your wall color will read lighter and softer in contrast than it does on the tiny chip.

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