Understanding Color Tones and Navigating the Beige Rainbow

You don’t need us to tell you that the color of your shades is important. The difference between warm cream and taupe could be the difference between a room that you absolutely adore and a room that will always leave you slightly disappointed and wistful. But with home décor, choosing the perfect color can be one of the most daunting tasks. To help make this easier on you, we offer free samples so you don’t have to do guess work based off of a computer screen. But today we are going one step further and providing a crash course in color terminology. Because in world where there are fifty shades of beige, knowing warm colors, cool colors, and every undertone in between can be a big help.

Warm Colors

Warm colors are created with red, orange, yellow, or combinations of the three. They make you think of sunlight. Warm colors feel like they move towards you, so they are good to use in making large rooms feel more friendly and comfortable.

Cool Colors

Cool colors are made with green, blue, and light purple. They are more relaxing and soothing, and make you think of water. Cool colors look as though they are moving away from you, so they work well making smaller rooms feel larger.

It’s important to think about how you can create balance with both warm and cool colors in every room, and what mood you want to create for the room.

Undertone

When you look at a color, right away you see the mass tone. The undertone is the underlying, subdued tone of the color. For example, teal has a green undertone. Undertones become more apparent when used with other colors, so a good way to detect the undertone is to compare your swatch to other colors in that family. For neutral colors, which are more complex, compare your swatch to pure colors of the rainbow spectrum. If your swatch has a red undertone, this will become apparent next to the pure green. Your undertones and mass tones should all work together.

Choose some neutral tone samples and see for yourself!