PaintDial

Research

The UK Paint Choice Index

Britain sells 5,582 paint colours across 9 brands. This study asks a simple question of all of them: how much genuine choice is that?

Computed automatically from PaintDial’s live colour library, using the same thresholds as every page on this site. Last built August 2026.

1. Half of Britain’s paint colours are duplicates

2,743 of 5,582colours are genuinely distinct at our near-identical threshold

You could remove 51% of the colours on sale in Britain and every one removed would still have a near-identical match among the survivors. Without any clustering at all: 72% of colours have a near-identical twin somewhere on the market, and 62% have one from a different brand. Check any colour’s twins in the tool →

2. 633 colours share an exact value with a sibling from their own brand

Not near-identical — identical. The same published swatch value, sold under two names by the same brand:

Regency WhiteCraig & Rose · #EEE5D6IsabellineCraig & Rose · #EEE5D6

Porcelain DollDulux · #E8E7E3Quiet DissentDulux · #E8E7E3Quiet HideawayDulux · #E8E7E3Tranquil MistDulux · #E8E7E3

Dulux accounts for most of these: 253 of its published values appear under more than one name.

3. Inside the biggest ranges, most colours have an in-house twin

Share of each brand’s own range with a near-identical twin from the same brand:

Bigger ranges duplicate more — partly simple arithmetic: publish 2,226 colours into a finite space and overlap follows. But it means a bigger colour card is not proportionally more choice.

4. The colour Britain doesn’t sell

Take every colour a standard screen can display and ask: does any UK paint come very close to it (our site-wide ΔE < 5)? The answer is yes for just 47% of them. The missing colour isn’t evenly spread — it is overwhelmingly the vivid end of purple (43% of the gap), blue (8%) and the reds and pinks (25%).

Part of that is physics: screens emit light and pigment can’t, so no paint will ever match a glowing violet. But the pattern holds inside paint itself: British paint pushes red to a peak chroma of 0.21, yet purple stops at 0.10 — less than half. 190 red paints exceed a chroma of 0.10. Exactly 1 purple does.

Method

Every colour is each brand’s own published digital swatch. Distinctness uses greedy clustering at the site’s published near-identical threshold (ΔE < 2 in our hue-weighted OKLab metric), averaged over five seeded random orderings; the spread across orderings is about 1%, so the count is not an artefact of ordering. Colour families are the site’s own live classification — the same rule that files every colour in the library. Screen-colour coverage samples the sRGB gamut uniformly in OKLab volume (40,000 seeded points) and measures distance to the nearest paint with the site’s own metric and thresholds.

What this doesn’t claim

• Published swatch values, not paint in tins. Brands may distinguish colours in ways a swatch value doesn’t capture — finish, texture, opacity. Two identical values are identical on screen.
• Duplication is not an accusation. Much of it is arithmetic — large ranges into a finite colour space — and some may be deliberate continuity across renamed ranges.
• Screens glow; pigment doesn’t. Some of the “missing” colour in finding 4 is physically out of reach for any paint. The red-versus-purple contrast, measured within paint alone, does not depend on that comparison.
• No price claims. PaintDial holds no live pricing.

Companion study: The UK Paint Match Index — how closely premium colours can be matched across brands. Questions or corrections — get in touch.