White Paint Chips & Relative Value

We are painting the walls in our new home white.  This feels like it should be an easy task to pick white paint, right?  I mean, here is a white paint chip:

Only it's not really white.

Suddenly it looks very peachy, right?  (I did no editing or filtering on these photos.  These are straight out of my phone.)

Color is relative.  We see colors -- even white -- differently depending on what it's next to.

White:

Actually, it's vaguely green:

Again and again -- the whites seem to change even photo to photo:

I swear to you that in the store, every single one of these paint chips looked like a clean crisp white...until they all got together:

It's a reminder to me to explore more subtlety in my color choices when I'm painting.  

If you'd like to read more about color relativity, this is an article I enjoyed.

Thanks for stopping by!