Cheddar Corn

A color with enough presence that "accent" is really the only honest use for it. Vista Paint catalogs it as Cheddar Corn, 1001.

A chroma of 20.1 is well into the range where the color affects everything nearby - light fixtures, glossy surfaces, even skin tones under it. In a room with plenty of natural light, this can cover more wall area than it could in a dim one, where the same color reads heavier.

Warm bulbs make it warmer still; daylight bulbs cool it back toward neutral. Light reflectance reads 69.0, though with this much color in it that number is the smaller half of the story.

This color and blues and cool greys don't get along in the same room - they sit on opposite sides of the spectrum, so pairing them tends to feel like tension rather than contrast.

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.

Dunn-Edwards Boysenberry Shadow makes a good second wall color here - different enough to read as a real choice, close enough to still feel related (about 20.6 points apart in light reflectance). This is not a color that benefits from shine - the saturation does the work, and a flat finish lets it do that evenly.

If the brand is not fixed, Behr Miami Stucco (BXC-37) is the same color by measurement - delta-E 0.91. 4 other-brand colors land within delta-E 2 of this one - a well-populated part of the spectrum with several near-equivalents to choose from.

It is lighter than 74 percent of the Vista Paint range. The name is not unique: Dutch Boy DCP-1001 also sells a color called Cheddar Corn, and it is not the same shade. Vista Paint lists it in the C codes, alongside 1,421 other colors.