As White As Snow

White. What comes to mind when you think of white? Fresh, crisp, hotel bedding? Brand new socks at the start of the school year? Snow covered fields? A beautiful wedding dress? A pavlova with perfect peaks?

That delicious dessert lends its name to a white paint colour for one brand! Other names of white paint include snowflake, moon shimmer, cliff walk, salt, blank canvas, frosted dawn. The imagery is strong! But you can’t pick a paint colour just because you like the name or the imagery behind it.

When it comes to choosing white paint, you really are spoilt for choice. But that choice may seem overwhelming, and according to Farrow & Ball, “White is never just white.”

So how can we make informed choices when we want to use white paint in our homes. Well there are two important things to consider. The first is the lighting within the room, and the second is the undertone in the paint. These two factors need to be weighed up together. Let me give you some examples. If your room is south facing, it will have a lot of warm, natural light coming through the window. If you want to achieve a pure white on your walls, you should choose a white paint which has cool, blue undertones, because the cool paint, paired with the warm light, gives you a happy equilibrium. If you were to take that same paint and use it in a north facing room, it will feel cold and err towards blue, because the blue undertone plus cool, northern light will only ever give you a cold feel. That doesn’t mean you can’t use white in a north facing room, just choose a white paint with warm, yellow undertones – that way it will balance out the northern light, and give you a fresh, clean look, without feeling too cold. If your room faces east or west, the lighting changes throughout the day, so think about when in the day you are most using that room and apply the same principles.

“How do I look for the undertone?!” Good question! It really isn’t as complicated as you might think. The best thing to do is compare your paint sample to a simple piece of white A4 paper. If it looks blue compared to the paper, you know if has blue undertones. If the paint looks like it’s heading towards pink, it has red undertones. And if it is looking creamy, then the undertone is yellow.

Allow me for one moment to get scientific. There’s actually no such thing as just white. White is all colours. White is simply the lightest shade of a colour. So the very very lightest pink will appear ‘white’, but so will the lightest grey, the lightest yellow and the lightest blue. You get the point. But this is actually really helpful to bear in mind when you’re choosing your ‘white’ paint!