Joyful Tears

It is dark enough that the room, not the paint, becomes the thing you notice - though the teal keeps it from reading as flat black. Vista Paint's designation for it is 0683.

At 12.0, light hits this wall and mostly stops there - plan the room's lighting as if the walls were not helping at all. Warm bulbs pull the teal forward, close to the surface; daylight bulbs flatten it back into something closer to plain black.

If the room already has reds and brick tones in the floor, a rug, or the furniture, this color will fight it rather than sit well beside it - the two sit at opposite ends of the color spectrum, which is exactly why they clash instead of blend.

Warm metals - brass, aged gold, unlacquered fixtures - gain a contrast against this that they do not have against a lighter wall; it is a common reason people choose a color this deep in the first place. A natural scheme here moves in three clear steps: this color on the main wall, a noticeably lighter mid-tone for a second wall or built-in, and a near-white on the ceiling. Each jump should be obvious at a glance, not something you have to squint to tell apart (roughly 12.0, 49 and 85 on the light-reflectance scale, for reference).

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.

If the wall has any texture or repair work, matte is worth the trade-off even though it holds up to less scrubbing than a satin or eggshell.

By the numbers, Behr Caribbean Current (P460-7) and this color are indistinguishable - delta-E 0.79, well under what the eye can separate. This is a relatively uncrowded spot in the spectrum - just 1 color from other brands come this close.

It is lighter than 9 percent of the Vista Paint range. This is a crowded part of the scale - 368 colors measure within a point of 12.0 - so most brands will have something close. Vista Paint lists it in the C codes, alongside 1,421 other colors.