Dolphin's Cove or In Your Eyes?

I have decided that choosing paint colors is extremely overwhelming, and that is because there are too many of them and they have names that don't make sense or look anything like what they sound like. We had almost our entire house painted last week so I have become very familiar with the Benjamin Moore color wheel. There are 1,621 colors to be exact.

For my house I stayed pretty simple. I settled on plantation beige for the main living area color; our bedroom is french vanilla; our bathroom is antique glassware, Taylor's room is feather gray and Claire's room is some shade of pink that I forgot the name of. None of those actually sound too strange although feather gray is way more blue than gray and plantation beige is more gold than anything. Plus - when I think of plantations - I don't think of beige or gold or anything close to what the color actually looks like.

Take Workout Green for example. What in the world? Is that because after you work out you feel like you are going to throw up and your face gets green? The actual color is a cross between lime and seafoam. Can't you just say "half lime/half seafoam." You can actually picture that in your mind better than workout green. Or what about Quiet Moments. Before I tell you what quiet moments actually looks like - think about what a quiet moment looks like to you. I bet it is different for everyone. To me it would be a very light shade of blue with a little aqua thrown in - or maybe a slightly tinted white. Benjamin Moore says it is a medium shade of gray/green. Or how about Country Romance? I picture some annoying shade of red or pink because really - what is a "country romance"? The good people pf Benjamin Moore see it as a dark taupey/purply/brown.

I think paint companies should just take the 133 Crayola crayon colors and work from that. Every color of paint would just be some darker or lighter version of the crayon color. You have your basic colors that we all know and love - blue, red, green, yellow, etc. Then you have varying shades of those colors. For example you'd have your basic yellow then within yellow you'd have the following: canary, dandelion, goldenrod, green yellow, laser lemon, lemon yellow, orange yellow, sunglow, and unmellow yellow. Within those you can go darker or lighter and that allows for PLENTY of choices. It is too overwhelming to pick between 174 shades of white/beige for your room.

Next time someone asks me my favorite color, I am going to tell them it is either Dolphin's Cove or In Your Eyes. That sounds way more exotic than saying light turquoise blue.