Bluette

This is the kind of blue that works in more rooms than it does not, which is rarer than it sounds. Bluette is Vista Paint's 0616.

At LRV 50.0 it sits where most rooms want a wall: light enough to feel open, dark enough to have a surface. Chroma 16.6 sits in a comfortable middle: present enough to notice, restrained enough to live with.

Bedrooms and living rooms, where it is seen in lamplight as much as daylight. Warm bulbs will soften it; daylight bulbs push it further cool. For a secondary wall, Vista Paint Light Lavendar gives a natural step up in brightness without feeling like a mismatch (roughly 35 LRV points apart).

Rooms already built around oranges and warm terracotta are the hardest fit for this color - the two are opposites, and opposites next to each other rarely feel calm.

Next to it, white trim reads brighter and cooler than it does anywhere else in the house - the gap in light reflectance is what does that, not the trim paint itself. For layering, pair this with a clearly lighter mid-tone on a secondary wall or cabinetry, and keep the ceiling close to white. The gap between each step should be big enough to see without thinking about it (roughly 50.0 / 68 / 85 on the reflectance scale).

By the numbers, PPG Everlasting (1161-3) and this color are indistinguishable - delta-E 0.67, well under what the eye can separate. This is a relatively uncrowded spot in the spectrum - just 2 colors from other brands come this close. A satin finish is worth it in a room that needs to be wiped down often, at the cost of showing a bit more of the wall's surface than a flat finish would.

It is lighter than 53 percent of the Vista Paint range. Vista Paint lists it in the C codes, alongside 1,421 other colors.