How to find out what paint colour is on your wall

Start with the tin, then the paperwork

If the original paint is still in the house, the label has the exact name and code, and nothing else will beat it. Check the garage, the loft, and under the stairs. Even a dried-out tin is useful — the lid usually carries a printed colour code.

No tin? Two pieces of paperwork are worth hunting down before you try anything clever:

• Decorator invoices. Trade quotes almost always itemise the paint by name and finish, because the decorator had to buy it.
• The house sale pack or a handover folder, if the place was recently built or refurbished. Developers often list the standard finishes.

This matters more than it sounds. Every other method on this page gives you a close match. The tin gives you the actual colour.

Matching it yourself, with a phone

When the paperwork is gone, you are matching by eye or by camera. A camera is the more reliable of the two, because it compares numbers rather than impressions — your eye adapts to the light in a room within seconds, which is exactly why a colour looks different when you carry a chip from one room to another.

The method is simple:

1. Sample a clean, undamaged area of the wall, away from switches and skirting where paint gets scuffed and handled.
2. Take the reading in the light the room actually gets, not with a lamp pressed against the wall.
3. Compare the top few results side by side rather than taking the first one.

That last step is the one people skip. A match engine returns candidates ranked by closeness, and the second or third result is often the better real-world match once you see them together.

Why your wall is not the colour it used to be

Worth knowing before you chase a perfect match: the wall has almost certainly drifted from the colour that came out of the tin.

• Sunlight fades pigment, and it does it unevenly. A wall with a window gets lighter near the glass.
• Whites and off-whites yellow with age, particularly oil-based ones.
• Nicotine, cooking grease and soot shift a colour warmer over years.
• Finish changes the reading. The same pigment in matt and in eggshell reflects light differently, so a gloss wall reads lighter at a glancing angle.

So matching a ten-year-old wall and then painting the whole room in that match will not look like a touch-up — it will look like a slightly different room. For a patch repair, match the wall. For a repaint, match the wall, then consider going back to the original colour if you can identify it.

Getting from a colour to a tin you can buy

A match is only useful if a shop will mix it. Two things make that work:

Ask for the brand’s own code, not just a name. Colour names repeat across manufacturers and get retired between seasons. Codes are what the mixing machine takes.

Know that most merchants can cross-mix. If the match lands on a Farrow & Ball colour and your nearest shop is a Dulux stockist, they can usually mix to the HEX or RGB values, or to their own nearest equivalent. Ask before you drive across town.

Test before you commit

Whatever method you used, buy a tester and paint a patch — at least A4, two coats, left to dry fully. Matt paint in particular dries noticeably darker than it looks when wet, and a colour that was correct on screen can still be wrong on the wall.

Look at the patch in morning light and under the lights you use at night. If it disappears into the surrounding wall in both, you have your colour.

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PaintFox does the camera-matching part: point it at a wall and it ranks the closest shades from Sherwin-Williams, Benjamin Moore, Behr, Farrow & Ball, Valspar, Dulux and PPG, with the HEX and RGB values for each. It is free, and the catalogue is stored on the phone, so it works in a basement or a shop aisle with no signal.