Cheerful Cherry

Near the bottom of the LRV scale, where the pink stops being read as hue and starts being read as shadow. Vista Paint's designation for it is 8693.

With an LRV this low (9.0), a room relies entirely on its fixtures; the paint gives nothing back. Warm bulbs pull the pink forward, close to the surface; daylight bulbs flatten it back into something closer to plain black.

Depending on the bulb, this can genuinely read as red or as pink - it sits right on the border between the two, only 11° apart. Worth checking before committing to a full wall: blues and cool greys nearby - in a floor, a rug, a piece of furniture - will read as a clash here, not a complement, since the two colors sit at opposite ends of the spectrum.

Wood tones next to this read darker and richer than they do against a paler wall; it is one of the more dependable effects of putting a light-absorbing color next to anything reflective. The safest multi-color scheme moves from this dark wall to a noticeably lighter secondary tone, then to a near-white ceiling - three genuinely different depths rather than three shades of the same idea (LRV 9.0, 47 and 85, if you're matching by the numbers).

It belongs on a feature wall in a room that already has light to spare, rather than on every wall of a room that needs brightening. Sherwin-Williams Colonial Revival Gray pairs well as a second surface - close enough in feel to belong in the same room, far enough in lightness to read as two distinct walls (about 39 points apart on the reflectance scale).

A flat or matte finish hides surface imperfections that a color this dark would otherwise flag under any raking light.

Dunn-Edwards Burnt Crimson (DEC705) runs close enough - delta-E 2.17 - that swapping brands should not change how the room looks. No other brand has a color within delta-E 2 of this one - a genuinely uncommon shade.

It is lighter than 4 percent of the Vista Paint range. This is a crowded part of the scale - 442 colors measure within a point of 9.0 - so most brands will have something close. Vista Paint lists it in the K codes, alongside 1,318 other colors.