White and Light

Are you giving though to the white and cream combo in th 2013′s Pantone Color Planner?

Here are some things you need to know first – it’s no longer simply the challenge of choosing durable white surfaces amenable to real-life use. Whites are amongst the most challenging colors to use on walls – and I do mean whites as shown below. Here are some white paint chips I rounded up last evening at Lowe’s, and put in a desk top scanner to create the image below. Keep this image in mind, and look at the next one.

Some white paint chips I rounded up at Lowes's

Here are precisely the same chips photographed with my iPhone against a backdrop of white paper indoors.

The same paint chips photographed indoors with my iPhone

So why so different? Are these really white? The answers: Lighting, and yes.

If you’re skeptical, go to any paint counter display, pick up a handful of white samples, and turn away from the display lighting. This works as such because color actually has a temperature – yes, nothing is ever as simple as meets the eye on this blog!

The whitest white light is generated by the process called incandescence, or black body radiation (an opaque and non-reflective body) which occurs when bodies of atoms with a certain temperature emit a certain type of radiation. The color of a black body at a temperature of 2,848 kelvins is most closely matched by incandescent light bulbs. Daylight can vary from a cool red up to a bluish color at 5,600 K, but the correlated color temperature of an incandescent light bulb is 2,848 K. The long and short of it, is that the most ambient white can be gauged in the environment lit by incandescent light – this explains why interior designers for all their LEED existentialist environmentalism are hoarding more incandescent bulbs than whiskey during prohibition.

All designers know the drill: If every American replaced just one light bulb in their home with a light bulb that’s earned the ENERGY STAR, enough energy would be saved to light 3 million homes for a year, at a savings worth some $600 million in annual energy costs. More significantly,  9 billion pounds of greenhouse gas emissions per year would be prevented equivalent to those from about 800,000 cars. While a 05 Watt compact fluorescent bulb replaces 420 Watt incandescent light bulb the cool white 4100K color temperature light emitted is less than ideal aesthetically – yet a planet that you can leave your kids matters!