May Fair

A color built for commitment, not for blending in. 8078, from Vista Paint.

A chroma of 38.6 is well into the range where the color affects everything nearby - light fixtures, glossy surfaces, even skin tones under it. Ideal for a single accent wall or a small room where you want to commit.

In a room that gets little direct sun, this color's warmth does some of the work daylight would otherwise be doing. Light reflectance reads 24.0, though with this much color in it that number is the smaller half of the story.

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 24.0, 55 and 85, if you're matching by the numbers).

Vista Paint Jet Stream makes a good second wall color here - different enough to read as a real choice, close enough to still feel related (about 57 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.

Benjamin Moore Cinco de Mayo (1286) runs close enough - delta-E 2.56 - 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 23 percent of the Vista Paint range. Vista Paint lists it in the K codes, alongside 1,318 other colors.