color can be too tricky

There's a Sherwin Williams paint color that has been floating around our office the last few months that has been getting a lot of negative feedback from us.

It was requested by a client and when we pulled the swatch, we all had a bit of a gasp moment. As we looked at each other we all knew what we were thinking. The name that SW gave it is more than appropriate. It is color Butter Up (SW6681) and it really looks like a stick of butter. I mean really.

Well, everyone (on the project at least) had given their two cents about it and we were at an agreement. It looked like butter. It was YELLOW.

I ended up taking a bunch of paint swatches home last week for multiple (personal) projects and didn't even realize that one of the colors I had pulled out my box had been Butter Up. I grabbed it because it went with one of SW's new trend sets that I liked and wanted to see if I could make any of the colors work in my house. Once I got them home and started looking at them, I realized I had the Butter Up and immediately threw it into the "not using" pile. After flipping through the rest of the paints and deciding on some and debating others I thought I would see how far off the Butter Up was from the color we painted our bathroom two years ago. I thought, this will be a good way to see just how yellow this paint swatch really is.

Insert cringed face here.

I threw the swatch up on the wall and to my astonishment it was almost an exact match.

I love the yellow color of our bathroom. It's not too cheery but not too pastel/Easter egg either. It's nice, it works, I've always liked it. So why did I hate SW's color swatch so much?!

It's always amazing to me how much color changes when it's on paper vs. the wall. Or under fluorescents vs. incandescent. I spend a lot of time looking at color, it's part of my job. So I'm now admitting I was wrong. Butter Up is not the worst color in the entire world and when it's on the wall, it doesn't look like smeared butter. Happy Sherwin Williams?

It probably would have been a good idea to Google image Butter Up to see if people had shown it in their spaces. They have and here are a few of them:

found at timesunion

found at apartment therapy chicago edition

found at porter house designs