Filed under: Living Spaces
An article in the New York Times revealed that a surprising amount of thinking goes into a paint color name. But does it make a difference if the paint you'll use is called "beige" or "cappuccino"? I originally thought "no," but then remembered a past run-in with an unfortunately-named paint color. 
My first apartment was on the last street before you officially crossed over into "the wrong side of the tracks," but it was a brownstone and that made it OK. (It was also relatively affordable, meaning that I only had to live off of ramen noodles for only one cliched week out of every four.) We all have delusions of the places we'd like to live in when we finally achieve adulthood, and for me it was a small apartment in a brownstone. Small, because I would only fill up a larger apartment with junk, and a brownstone, because it would make a studio apartment seem impressive.
I had thought about the hypothetical brownstone apartment whenever my suburban existence felt like the first verse of a Bruce Springsteen song. The town, and its surrounding satellite developments, was not so much a town but a life decision. Families were content to stay there and just not do much else, which gave the area an air of a time capsule. I went to the same high school that my mother did, followed seven years later by my brother. Thinking back about how pleasant this actually was, I can only think of what a jerk I was to judge it. But at the time, the hypothetical brownstone offered an escape hatch into a life of glamour and sophistication, instead of one marked by old drugstores and track meets.
I knew the apartment so well in my head that when I moved in, I quickly embarked on a paint job that I had already undertaken in my imagination. The living area, a long shoebox distinguished with a and fancy moldings, would be painted in a rich coral like the home in The Royal Tenenbaums. I went out and immediately grabbed the first coral I saw, then came back to the apartment and brushed on the paint.
And it was a disaster. Despite exactly one 6-foot-tall window, the room (which faced North, in the shadow of more tightly-packed houses) got absolutely no light. It turned the coral into a terribly claustrophobic shade of orange.
So back to the paint store. I'd have to go with something lighter towards the pink family to get the effect I was trying for. Scrutinizing the paint chips as if they held the meaning of life, or at least the winning lottery numbers, I ended up with one winner, a pink tinged with hints of warmth. I looked towards the bottom of the paint color card to see what the name was: 'Tickled Pink.' A name tinged with hints of judgment.
The color was right but the name, as silly as it sounds, was just wrong. I was a grown woman who saved her pennies and moved into a place all by myself. I was starting my first real job, which I had worked through countless sleepless nights in order to get (again) all by myself, without any connections or anything. I had made it out of the old town. I was in the triumphant final verse of the Springsteen song.
I would not be painting my home in a shade that was described in a brochure as, "Perfect for a little girl's room...suggestive of fairytales and make-believe."
After way too much time in the paint aisle, I chose a different candidate altogether. I wish I could tell you that it was something like "Perfectly Appropriate Pink For a Businesslady" but that would be a lie. Instead, it was 'Flamingo's Dream.'
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Source: http://www.diylife.com/2011/07/01/paint-color-name/
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