How to Use Paint Chips

The Front of the Paint Chip

By looking at the front of the paint chip, you can learn several helpful facts about each particular color. Let’s use Glidden paint’s Snow Shadow Blue as an example.

On the right side of the paint chip, you’ll see a letter and number in an oval. The letter itself is the color family classification. On this paint chip, the B identifies this chip as a member of the blue family. Every other paint chip on the wall with a B in the oval is also considered part of the blue family, even if it might look a little different to your eye—like perhaps more green than blue. Glidden paint has identified 8 different color families for its paints: Red (R), Orange (O), Yellow (Y), Green (G), Blue (B), Violet (V), Warm Neutrals (WN) and Cool Neutrals (CN).

Generally, all the colors in the same color family will be housed together on the wall of your local paint store.

The number inside of the oval represents a color’s specific place within that color family. Although it’s not always true, I have noticed that most of the time the sequential numbers are generally steps up or steps down from the next number in the sequence. For example, Pacific Coast Blue, True Turquoise, and Snow Shadow Blue are sequential. As you can see, they are all tropical blue shades, but they vary in color intensity and vibrancy. So, if you find a color that you like and you think you’d like to see close alternatives, just move up or down the color family.

On the left hand side of the chip underneath a color name, you’ll see another series of numbers. Looking at Snow Shadow Blue again, you’ll see that the numbers are: 50BG 76/068.Now in all honesty, these are numbers that you can largely ignore… unless you are a color nerd like me.

But, for my fellow color nerds, I’ll break it down: the 50BG represents the color’s hue. The letters represent where the color lands on a color wheel. So, Snow Shadow Blue is in the Blue Green hue family. The number represents where that color falls within the hue. Snow Shadow Blue's 50 means that it is in the middle of the Blue Green hue. A 00 would mean that the color is closest to the Green hue, and a 99 would mean that it is closest to the Blue hue. The numbers fall between 0 and 99.

The 76 represents the color’s light reflectance value, or LRV. This is essentially the lightness or the darkness of a color, where 0 is pure black and 99 is pure white. You can see that represented in the series of paint chips above, where Pacific Coast Blue (47) is darker than True Turquoise (61), which is darker than Snow Shadow Blue (76).

The 068 represents the color’s chroma. The chroma is the intensity of a color. Less intense colors are closer to a neutral grey, where full chroma colors are brighter, more intense shades. The previous series of paint chips shows that the higher this number, the more intense the color.