We compared every one of the 5,582 colours published by 9 UK paint brands against every other — millions of pairwise comparisons — to answer one question: how many premium paint colours are genuinely unique, and how many already have a near-identical twin?
Updated automatically from PaintDial’s live colour library. Last built August 2026.
62% of premium colours (521 of 845) have a near-identical match from a value brand. 96% (810) have at least a very close one.
Put plainly: based on the brands’ own published digital swatches, if you want a premium colour there’s a 96% chance another brand already makes something very close to it. Check any colour in the tool →
Of 845 premium colours, just 20 have no very-close match from any other brand. Every one belongs to Little Greene.
Only 14 of 5,582 colours across all 9 brands are genuinely deep. By brand: Little Greene 10 · Dulux 3 · Johnstone's 1.
That single fact explains the finding above. Little Greene isn’t unmatchable because it’s premium — it’s unmatchable because it’s the only brand making colours that dark. Depth, not prestige, is what can’t be copied.
Raw counts favour whoever publishes most colours. Corrected for range size — closest-match wins per 100 colours of each brand’s own range — the picture changes:
Volume and aim are different things. See every Farrow & Ball colour’s closest match →
Every colour is each brand’s own published digital swatch — we don’t photograph or estimate colours. Differences are computed in OKLab, weighting hue drift twice and discounting lightness, because a paint a shade lighter still reads as the same colour while one that’s drifted in hue reads as a different one. Thresholds are the ones used across the site: near-identical = ΔE < 2, very close = ΔE < 5. “Genuinely deep” means OKLab lightness below 0.3.
Companion study: The UK Paint Choice Index — how much genuine choice Britain’s paint colours actually offer. Journalists and researchers: the underlying comparisons are all on the site, colour by colour. Questions or corrections — get in touch.