Should you paint your walls in YOUR best colors?

The following article is for people who have had their colors "done" professionally, are thinking about doing so, or think they know what their best colors are. It's also for people who are moving to a new home and will have the perfect opportunity to create a personalized color environment after they sell their succesfully STAGED home. It can also be found on my color blog at www.donnacognac.blogspot.com
Remember, colors for staging and colors for living are often very different and changing the color of some of the rooms in your home may be necessary to improve your chance of selling quickly and at the best price. The pay off is worth the effort if you have colors that will not sit well with some potential buyers. Buyers may also use the need to repaint odd colored or very taste specific colors as a bargaining tool to lower your price.

Should you paint your walls in YOUR best colors? The answer to that question is yes, no, maybe, and it depends. Your personal color palette is one that illuminates your skin, hair, and eyes when worn in close proximity to your face and body. The bounce or reflection of these colors will have a syncronistic relationship with your color design that is mutually beneficial to both you and your attire.

Now does that hold true for your decor as well? To a degree yes. You may want to consider using your personal palette as a guide for choosing wall colors in your home. Surely you'll look fabulous when the backdrop you stand in is showing you in the most positive light. Right? But what if your palette is one that is psychologically warm in temperature and you are decorating a south facing room in a hot place like Florida? The result of using a warm wall color would be to make inhabitants 'feel' psychologically warmer in a part of the country where keeping home interiors feeling cool is a better strategy. If your personal color palette happened to be decidely cool in temperature, using it to decorate your home in Alaska would make your home's interior 'feel' colder.

My opinion is that one should use colors to create the energy they want in that room and to have that as their first priority. They can consult their personal palette to look for options that will help create that energy. Doing so may require you to ignore your personal best colors or to either neutralize or clarify the hues that are in your palette. If someone wants to create a room with high energy and they want to use green for example, they could choose a green tone from their palette and look for paint chips that repeat that hue but in a softer intensity or lighter value. Remember that high intensity colors are psychologically energizing and are not the best choices for bedrooms or rooms designed for relaxation.

Eye colors and skin colors are wonderful for the walls of bedrooms and bathrooms. A custom body color charting consultation with a color analysis professional would provide you with the swatches you'd need to match paint chips at the store. These specific hues would repeat and flatter your coloring in those intimate environments. Skin tones are neutrals and can be taken to a lighter or darker value to provide a bit of contrast to your skin. Blue, gray, green, and light brown eyes are great starting points for choosing wall colors in these rooms. Those with very dark brown eyes might prefer to use their skin tone since dark colors make rooms feel closed and small.

Neutrals are extremely practical wall colors. Any of the neutral tones in our personal palettes can be used as a guide for flattering wall colors that lend themselves to a wide range of colored home accessories. Neutrals have the additional advantage of being very 'livable' for a very long time. Colored walls can get old fast. Unless you like to repaint fairly often, it's safer to use neutrals or near-neutrals on the walls and use more pronounced colors in room accessories, window treatements, wall decor, pillows and such. Things that can be changed out to give a room a whole new look to reflect changing seasons or when you're just ready for a new look.

Strong colored walls are more successful in rooms that we don't spend as much time in. Dining rooms or bathrooms for example. Red dining rooms have been popular in recent years. This was a perfect place to use red. Not only is the dining room less used, red is also an appetite stimulant. BUT a psychologically 'cool' version of red like magenta, watermelon or raspberry would not work as well as a warmer red like brick, clay, poppy, or tomato in a dining room. So those with cooler personal palettes should avoid their reds for dining rooms.







For north facing, basement or windowless rooms....I'm a advocate of using yellow in any room that does not receive sun light. That's not to say that I wouldn't use yellow in a room that did have sunlight. Can you ever really have too much sunshine in your life??? Choose slightly to very muted shades with some warmth and avoid lemony tones of yellow. Think butter, maize, straw, and gold.







Anyone with an interior wall color question is invited to ask me in the comment section of my blog page or through Facebook.