Guide to Warm and Cool Paint Colours | Benjamin Moore (2024)

FAQs

How to tell warm and cool colors? ›

Warm & Cool 101

Warm colors—yellow, orange, red and combinations therein—breathe energy, positivity and a sense of sunshine into any room. Cool colors—green, blue and purple—evoke relaxation and calm. Neutrals like white and gray can also lean warmer or cooler depending on their undertones.

Warm colors tend to create an atmosphere that's cozy or energetic and cool colors often appear fresh and soothing. Look at the lighting. How much and what type of natural light a room gets can have a big effect on the undertones that come out of a color.

These pairs include blue and orange, red and green and violet and yellow. You'll get maximum contrast and impact by combining those. Just the tiniest pop of a warm color in an otherwise cool setting adds instant drama and changes the overall perception of the space from mellow to exciting.

Cool Colors

Calm, relaxation and freshness are all attributes of cooler shades, including Ocean Air 2123-50, Winter Lake 2129-50, and Evening Dove 2128-30. Cool paint colors are popular in bathrooms and bedrooms.

Gray can appear to be cool or warm, which makes a difference when it comes to selecting colors that live well with gray. The key to a great match lies in coordinating the tones. Warm gray shades go well with other warm-toned colors, like taupe, blush pink, butter yellow, and burnt orange.

Whilst olive green is a great neutral colour to work with, olive is a warm colour in its undertone which means it works well with other warm colours. Warm shades of blues such as cobalt blue are an ideal match for olive green.

Warm or Cool? Different colors in the same family may be described as being "warm" or "cool." Colors with yellow undertones will seem warmer, while the same color with blue or red undertones will appear cool. Cool colors — blue, green, violet — invite relaxation and thought.

The interior palette is roughly divided into two groups of color: warm and cool colors. Reds, yellows, oranges and beige are warm. Blues, greens and grays are cool. If you look at the color wheel, warm colors are on one side of the wheel, and the cools reside on the other.

Mixing warm and cool colors in an interior helps to create a well-balanced space while injecting some color and personality.

Purples are considered neither cool or warm overall, it depends on the hue: a blueish purple is cool, a reddish purple warm. If in doubt, check the tendency of the color on the color wheel. Blues are overall considered a cool color, but there are blues that lean towards purple or red – those are considered warm.

What are the two most calming cool colors? ›

“Shades of blue or green are known to have a relaxing effect—perfect for creating a serene feeling at home,” says Nicole Gibbons, interior designer and founder of the paint company Clare. “Everyone has their own preference on relaxing colors, but soft, cooler colors seem to feel right for most,” adds Yeo.

Balboa Mist is one of Benjamin Moore's go-to neutrals. It's a warm paint color that sits between gray and beige - the perfect pale greige. It amplifies the light in large, open spaces for a light and airy effect. An understated hint of beige makes Balboa Mist ideal for use as a unifying wall color throughout the home.

Does Aegean Teal have warm or cool undertones? Aegean Teal is a warm blue-green color with a strong undertone of green, which makes the blue shade less cool and more complex. A hint of gray adds an aged softness that keeps it from feeling too intense on four walls.

Edgecomb Gray is a neutral taupe color with slightly warm undertones. Depending on the type of lighting in a room, Edgecomb Gray will favor its warm beige tones more or less. If you have north-facing light, you can expect to show more of its gray base.

So, how do the two hair colour tones differ? Here's how: Warm hair colour tones have red, orange, and yellow pigments dominating the colour, whereas cool hair tones have blue, green, and violet pigments as the dominant colour. These represent the basics of hair colour theory.

Take a look at the veins on the inside of your wrist. Do they appear more blue or green? If your veins appear more blue, you're cool-toned but if you see more green, you're warm-toned. If you see a fair amount of both both green and blue, you have a neutral undertone.

Color families near orange on the color wheel are warm, those near the blue are cool. But within a color family you might get variations. for eample prisma scarlet red is a warm red because it contains a bit of yellow. Magenta is a cool red because it contains a bit of blue !

Regardless, the general idea is the warm colors are Red, Orange and Yellow; and the cool colors are Green, Blue and Magenta (Figure 2). Figure 2: The classic color wheel divided into Cool and Warm halves. Compare “yellow” to “blue” and it's easy to see yellow is warm and blue is cool.