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Sheens

Which sheen goes on which surface.

Sheen is the decision homeowners get least help with and regret most. This is the whole thing: the measured gloss numbers, the surface-by-surface answers, the places the manufacturers contradict each other, and the one argument nobody makes until the wall is already painted.

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The rule you already know is correct.

  • CeilingsFlat
  • WallsEggshell or satin
  • Baseboards and crownSemi-gloss or satin

Every manufacturer source we read agrees with all three clauses. If you do nothing else on this page, do that and you will land somewhere defensible. It is a good rule.

It is also incomplete in five specific ways, and a working painter would correct all five of them standing in your living room. Here they are.

Plain white ceiling detail photographed from below, an even flat surface returning no sheen
  1. 1

    Kitchen walls are satin, not semi-gloss.

    This is the single most common bad recommendation in the trade. The sources split: Sherwin-Williams says semi-gloss for kitchen walls, Benjamin Moore says pearl or satin. A kitchen wall is a big continuous plane, usually lit from a window and from under-cabinet fixtures, and semi-gloss across that plane is glary and finds every flaw in it. Keep the semi-gloss on the trim, the casings and the splash zones, where it earns its keep.

  2. 2

    Bathrooms no longer have to be shiny.

    The old rule was semi-gloss because bathrooms are wet. It is now partly obsolete. Sherwin-Williams still says satin or semi-gloss; Benjamin Moore says matte, specifically Aura Bath & Spa, built as a scrubbable matte with mildew resistance in high humidity. Both are right in 2026. Satin is the safe default for a family bathroom, a dedicated matte bath product is the premium move for a primary bath or powder room, and semi-gloss mostly belongs on the trim in that room.

  3. 3

    Matte belongs in the walls clause now.

    "Eggshell or satin" predates modern scrubbable matte. A high-binder matte is a different product that happens to share a gloss reading with cheap builder flat: it reads as pigment rather than plastic, colour lands deeper, and it cleans far better than traditional flat. The honest caveat is that it resists stains much better than it resists burnishing — rub one spot hard and you polish it.

  4. 4

    On trim, the product matters more than the sheen.

    The rule names a gloss level and skips the chemistry, which is backwards. A waterborne alkyd or urethane enamel — Benjamin Moore Advance, Sherwin-Williams Emerald Urethane Trim Enamel, Dunn-Edwards Aristoshield — levels out brush marks and cures to a hard, furniture-like film. A wall paint in a semi-gloss can, on a baseboard, will look and feel wrong at any gloss reading. Ask what product is going on the trim before you ask what sheen it is.

  5. 5

    The rule says nothing about the wall underneath.

    Sheen, colour depth and lighting together decide how good the drywall under the paint has to be. Pick a deep colour, or any sheen above flat, on a wall with a window on the same plane, and you have quietly specified a Level 5 substrate. That is the correction that costs money, so it gets its own section below.

    Why prep is a line item

The ladder

Flat to gloss, measured.

Gloss is not a synonym for shiny. It is how tightly a surface returns the light that lands on it. A flat film scatters that reflection into a wide, weak smear; a gloss film hands it back as a narrow, bright highlight. Everything else — washability, flaw-hiding, how deep your colour reads — follows from that one difference.

Close-up of a white painted wall showing brush texture and the way light grazes across the film

How to read the swatches. Every swatch below carries the same faint drywall seam, in the same place, at the same strength. Watch it appear as you go down the ladder. That is not a rendering trick — it is the entire argument of this page in one image. The higher the sheen, the more of the wall underneath it you are agreeing to see.

  1. Flat

    MPI G1
    Gloss at 60°
    0-5 units (MPI G1)
    Gloss at 85°
    10 units maximum
    Washable1/5
    Hides flaws5/5

    Dead flat. It reflects almost nothing from any viewing angle, so it hides more drywall sin than anything else you can buy, and color reads deep instead of plastic. The cost is cleaning. A traditional low-binder flat holds stains, and scrubbing one spot polishes it to a shine that looks worse than the mark you were trying to remove.

    Use it on

    • Ceilings. This is about as close to an absolute rule as painting has.
    • Low-traffic bedroom, dining and formal room walls
    • Older exterior siding with a wavy, checked or weathered surface
    • Any wall under hard raking light where the substrate cannot be fixed

    Keep it off

    • Bathrooms, if it is a builder-grade flat
    • Hallways, stairwells and anywhere hands land
    • Kitchens
    • Trim, doors and cabinets

  2. Matte

    MPI G2
    Gloss at 60°
    0-10 units (MPI G2)
    Gloss at 85°
    10-35 units
    Washable2/5
    Hides flaws5/5

    MPI calls matte "a high side sheen flat - a velvet-like finish." The difference from flat is real but it only shows at the grazing angle: up to 35 units at 85 degrees against flat's 10. Straight on, the two are identical. Light raking down a wall from a window is where you see it. The bigger difference is the resin. A modern scrubbable matte is a high-binder film engineered to read flat and clean like an eggshell. That is a different product that happens to share a gloss number with cheap flat.

    Use it on

    • Bedrooms, living and dining rooms, where the deeper color read is the point
    • Hallways, but only with a premium scrubbable line
    • Bathroom walls, with a product built for it (Benjamin Moore Aura Bath & Spa)
    • Ceilings

    Keep it off

    • High-traffic walls, if the product is a budget matte
    • Anywhere that gets scrubbed rather than wiped - matte resists stains far better than it resists burnishing
    • Trim and doors

  3. Eggshell

    MPI G3
    Gloss at 60°
    10-25 units (MPI G3)
    Gloss at 85°
    10-35 units
    Washable3/5
    Hides flaws4/5

    The default wall sheen for most of a house, and the one that asks the least of everybody. A soft, low sheen with enough film to wipe and not enough to start mapping drywall seams. Benjamin Moore calls eggshell "infinitely more durable than its namesake," and that is fair. If you do not know what you want, this is the answer that is hardest to get wrong.

    Use it on

    • Living rooms, dining rooms, bedrooms, offices
    • Hallways and entries
    • Most walls in most houses, most of the time
    • Ceilings in a bathroom, when paired with a moisture-resistant product

    Keep it off

    • Shower surrounds and splash zones
    • Trim that should read harder than the wall
    • Cabinets

  4. Satin

    MPI G4
    Gloss at 60°
    20-35 units (MPI G4)
    Gloss at 85°
    35 units minimum
    Washable4/5
    Hides flaws3/5

    One step up in shine and a real step up in cleanability. Satin is the moisture-and-abrasion answer: kitchens, bathrooms, hallways, kids' rooms, most exterior siding in sound condition. It also starts showing what is underneath it. Satin belongs on a wall that has earned it with prep, not on a wall that needs it to hide something.

    Use it on

    • Kitchen and bathroom walls
    • High-traffic walls, kids' rooms, mudrooms, laundry
    • Exterior body in good condition
    • Trim and doors, when a quieter look than semi-gloss is wanted
    • Garage doors

    Keep it off

    • Ceilings
    • Walls that have not been properly repaired and sanded
    • Rough or wavy older plaster

  5. Semi-gloss

    MPI G5
    Gloss at 60°
    35-70 units (MPI G5)
    Gloss at 85°
    Not specified - this level is read at 60 degrees
    Washable5/5
    Hides flaws2/5

    A hard, dense, nearly impermeable film. This is the trim and wet-room sheen, and on trim it is the right answer most of the time. On a large wall plane it is a mistake more often than not. At 35 to 70 gloss units it works like a raking-light amplifier and finds every nail pop, tape seam and roller lap in the room.

    Use it on

    • Baseboards, casings, crown, jambs
    • Interior and exterior doors
    • Cabinets
    • Bathroom trim and splash zones
    • Exterior trim, fascia, shutters, railings

    Keep it off

    • Any large wall plane that has not been skim-coated to Level 5
    • Ceilings
    • Kitchen walls - this is the single most common bad recommendation in the trade

  6. Gloss

    MPI G6
    Gloss at 60°
    70-85 units (MPI G6); above 85 is high gloss (G7)
    Gloss at 85°
    Not specified - this level is read at 60 degrees
    Washable5/5
    Hides flaws1/5

    The toughest, most washable film in the line, and the least forgiving thing you can put on a surface. Gloss magnifies everything under it. It belongs on small, smooth, properly prepared areas with a high visual payoff. Benjamin Moore says high gloss needs "careful application and preparation best left to a professional painter" and warns it "can accentuate blemishes." They are not being modest.

    Use it on

    • Front doors
    • Feature millwork, mantels, stair rails
    • Cabinetry, for a statement kitchen
    • Metal railings, gates and wrought iron

    Keep it off

    • Walls, in nearly every case
    • Ceilings, unless it is a deliberate high-end design move on a Level 5 substrate in a small formal room
    • Anything you are not willing to prep properly first

Gloss ranges are MPI gloss levels G1 to G7, measured per ASTM D523, from the MPI Architectural Painting Manual Guide Specification 09 91 23 (April 2022, section 2.5). The 85-degree grazing angle matters at the bottom of the ladder: at 60 degrees a flat and a matte both read near zero and cannot be told apart, and at 85 degrees they separate cleanly. That is the whole reason MPI measures low-gloss products at two angles.

The part that costs money

The paint can never be better than the wall under it.

Three things decide whether your walls need a skim coat, and none of them is the paint. Sheen, colour depth and lighting, together. That is the argument almost nobody makes to a homeowner before the job starts, and it is the reason two honest bids on the same house can be thousands of dollars apart.

Level 4 drywall — tape embedded and coated, three coats over the fasteners — is what almost every house is built to. The Gypsum Association calls it suitable for flat paints and light textures under forgiving lighting. Level 5 adds a skim coat of joint compound across the entire wall surface, and National Gypsum specifies it for critical lighting conditions and for dark or non-flat paint colours.

Read that last clause again, because it is doing an enormous amount of work. Dark or non-flat. A deep charcoal in anything above flat, on a wall with a window on the same plane, is asking for a Level 5 substrate whether anybody said the words out loud or not.

One detail tells you the standard is serious: a Level 5 finish has to be inspected with the final lighting and window treatments in place. You cannot sign a wall like that off under a work light.

So the choices you make about colour and sheen are also choices about prep. When Juan walks your job and says the wall needs a drywall finisher first, that is not an upsell — it is the only way the finish you picked can look like the picture you picked it from.

See the prep levels (760) 809-0025
Raking light crossing a painted wall at a shallow angle, throwing hard geometric shadows across the surface

Surface by surface

The answer, and the disagreement.

A recommendation and an alternate for every surface in a house. Three of these are genuinely contested between manufacturers, and one of them is our inference rather than anybody’s published position. Those are flagged. You should know which kind of answer you are getting.

Sources disagreeInference, not a citation

Walls, ceilings and wet rooms

  • Ceilings

    RecommendedFlatorA dedicated flat ceiling paint

    The least controversial rule in painting. Sherwin-Williams lists flat as the only recommendation for ceilings. Ceilings get lit by grazing light from windows and fixtures, which is the worst possible condition for sheen, so any shine at all telegraphs every taped joint, fastener and roller lap. Dedicated ceiling paints are also formulated thicker on purpose, so they spatter less. The one exception is a bathroom ceiling, where mildew resistance matters - and the answer there is a moisture-resistant flat or matte bath product, not a satin ceiling.

  • Living room and bedroom walls

    RecommendedEggshellorMatte, with a premium scrubbable line

    Eggshell is the safe default and it touches up well. Matte is the better-looking choice and it is what most designers specify now, because a flat surface absorbs light instead of bouncing it, so color reads deeper and truer. Bedrooms tolerate the lower sheen because traffic is low; living rooms trend a step up because of furniture contact. Now the part almost nobody tells homeowners: sheen, color depth and lighting together decide how good the drywall under the paint has to be. National Gypsum specifies a Level 5 finish - a skim coat of joint compound across the entire wall - for critical lighting and for dark or non-flat colors, and requires that Level 5 be inspected with the final lighting and window treatments in place. A deep charcoal in anything above flat, on a wall with a window on the same plane, is asking for a Level 5 substrate whether anybody said the words or not. The paint cannot be better than the wall under it. That is why prep is a line item and not a rounding error.

  • Hallways and high-traffic walls

    RecommendedEggshellorSatin where there are kids, pets or bikes

    Eggshell is the minimum. Satin if there is a stair wall people brace against or a hallway that takes a bicycle every day. Both Sherwin-Williams and Benjamin Moore list flat or matte as acceptable for hallways, and that is only true because they mean their premium scrubbable lines. If you specify flat or matte in a hallway, the product line is doing the work. A cheap flat will fail there, and it will fail at hand height where you look at it every single day.

  • Kitchen walls

    Sources disagree
    RecommendedSatinorEggshell in a light-use kitchen

    The common advice is semi-gloss and it is wrong for the walls. The sources split here: Sherwin-Williams says semi-gloss for kitchen walls, Benjamin Moore says pearl or satin. Satin is the better real-world answer. A kitchen wall is a big continuous plane, usually lit from a window and from under-cabinet fixtures, and semi-gloss across that plane is glary and shows every flaw in it. Keep the semi-gloss where it earns its keep - trim, casings and the splash zones.

  • Bathroom walls

    Sources disagree
    RecommendedSatinorA dedicated scrubbable matte bath paint

    This is the one where the sources genuinely disagree, so here is both sides. Sherwin-Williams says satin or semi-gloss because they withstand moisture. Benjamin Moore says matte - specifically Aura Bath & Spa, which they market as a scrubbable matte with mildew resistance and color retention in high humidity. Both are right today, and the traditional "semi-gloss in a bathroom" answer is now partly obsolete: you no longer have to accept a shiny bathroom to get moisture resistance. Practical position: satin is the safe default for a family or kids bathroom. Semi-gloss is over-shiny for bathroom walls and belongs on the trim in that room. A specialized matte bath product is the premium move for a primary bath or powder room, provided the ventilation is real. Builder-grade flat in a bathroom is still a genuine mistake.

Trim, doors and cabinets

The enamels we use
Fireplace with a painted white mantel and surrounding millwork set against a plain wall

  • Baseboards

    RecommendedSemi-glossorSatin, for a quieter modern look

    Semi-gloss is the workhorse and satin is the softer current look, but the sheen number is the less important half of this decision. What actually separates good trim from bad trim is the chemistry. A waterborne alkyd or urethane enamel - Benjamin Moore Advance, Sherwin-Williams Emerald Urethane Trim Enamel, Dunn-Edwards Aristoshield - levels out brush marks and cures to a hard, furniture-like film. A standard wall paint in semi-gloss on a baseboard will look and feel wrong at any gloss reading: it stays soft, it blocks against door stops and window sashes, and it holds every bristle track. Ask what product is going on the trim before you ask what sheen it is.

  • Crown moulding

    RecommendedSemi-glossorSatin

    Same product and same sheen as the baseboard in that room. Crown sits high and catches raking light coming off the ceiling plane, so if you are going to drop a step anywhere in a room, drop it here. And match your trim to itself: crown at one sheen and base at another in the same room reads as wrong even when nobody can name what is wrong.

  • Door casings and jambs

    RecommendedSemi-glossorSatin

    Casings take hands, vacuum cleaners and furniture corners, so they want the hardest film in the room. Run the casing at the same sheen and in the same product as the doors and the base, so the trim reads as one system against the wall. There is an aesthetic argument too - Sherwin-Williams notes that contrasting glossy trim against lower-sheen walls "adds depth, definition and texture to architectural features." That contrast is what trim is for.

  • Interior doors

    RecommendedSemi-glossorSatin

    A door is a hand-contact surface that also gets closed hard against a stop, which makes cure time a real issue rather than a technicality. Use a waterborne alkyd enamel and respect the cure. Dry to recoat is not cured: an uncured enamel will stick to its own jamb and tear the film when the door is opened. Benjamin Moore lists satin as ideal for interior doors; semi-gloss is the more common spec and the safer one on a door that gets used hard.

  • Cabinets

    RecommendedSemi-glossorSatin for a softer look, high gloss for a statement kitchen

    Semi-gloss or higher, universally - Benjamin Moore calls semi-gloss one of the best finishes for kitchen cabinets and Sherwin-Williams suggests high gloss for a striking one. And again the product matters more than the step: a cabinet-grade urethane alkyd enamel, sprayed and cured properly, is a different object from wall paint in a semi-gloss can. Budget the cure, not the recoat. Thirty days is a normal full cure on this class of product, which is why hardware goes back on carefully and why nobody should be scrubbing a new cabinet door in week one.

Outside the house

  • Exterior stucco body

    Inference, not a citation
    RecommendedFlatorLow-lustre or satin on smooth and sand-finish stucco

    Heavy-texture stucco is almost always finished flat or low-sheen. The texture makes its own micro-shadows, so any gloss reads unevenly across a wall, and the extra shine buys little because the texture holds dirt regardless. On a forty-foot wall in full Oceanside sun, flat hides the waves and satin finds them. Straight talk: we could not locate a stucco-specific manufacturer statement that says this outright. It is consensus practice, it follows directly from the texture-and-flaw-hiding principle, and it matches every exterior sheen source we read - but we are flagging it as inference rather than dressing it up as a citation.

  • Exterior trim, fascia and shutters

    RecommendedSemi-glossorGloss

    On the exterior the tradeoff flips slightly. Higher sheen resists dirt pickup and chalking and sheds water better, which is exactly what fascia, corbels, window trim and shutters need. It also telegraphs every wave in the substrate, which is precisely why it does not belong on the field of the wall. Low sheen on the body, shine on the details - that split is the whole exterior sheen strategy.

  • Front door

    RecommendedSemi-glossorHigh gloss

    This is where gloss genuinely belongs: a small area, a smooth substrate, high visual payoff, and a surface you want to wipe down. A high-gloss front door is a classic high-end move. It also means the door has to be right first - at 70-plus gloss units nothing is hidden. A high-gloss front door is a prep job with some paint at the end of it.

  • Garage door

    RecommendedSatinorSemi-gloss on a smooth, well-prepped door

    A garage door is a large flat plane on the front of the house, usually in full sun, and most of them are ribbed steel that already reads busy. Satin cleans and sheds dirt without turning the whole panel into a mirror. Bare or rusting metal needs a rust-inhibitive or direct-to-metal primer first - this is not a surface where primer is optional, because the failure here comes from underneath.

  • Railings and metal

    RecommendedSemi-glossorGloss

    Handrails, wrought iron, gates and metal doors want the hardest, most washable, most water-shedding film available, because the failure mode here is rust rather than scuffing. Prep is the entire job: degrease, take loose rust back to sound metal, then a rust-inhibitive or direct-to-metal primer. Sheen on a badly prepared rail is irrelevant. It will fail from the substrate up no matter what is on top.

Mistakes

The seven that cost the most.

None of these are exotic. Every one of them is something we get called out to look at, and every one of them was decided before a brush came out of the box.

  1. 1

    Semi-gloss on a wall that was never skim-coated.

    The classic. At 35 to 70 gloss units, semi-gloss acts as a raking-light amplifier: every nail pop, tape seam, skim-coat edge and roller lap turns into a visible shadow. Semi-gloss on a wall wants a Level 5 substrate to look right. On a normal Level 4 wall it will find everything the drywall finisher left behind, and no amount of careful rolling fixes that.

  2. 2

    Builder-grade flat in a bathroom.

    Low-binder flat films are permeable. They pick up moisture, then mildew, then fail. The nuance matters here and most write-ups skip it: a dedicated matte bath product is a completely different formulation and is fine. The cheap contractor flat that came with the house is not. Same gloss reading, opposite outcome.

  3. 3

    Two sheens meeting on the same plane.

    Two different sheens on one continuous wall will always show, even in the identical color, because the eye reads a reflectance boundary long before it reads a color boundary. This includes touching up an eggshell wall with the leftover satin from the trim, and it includes stopping a sheen change at an inside corner instead of at a true break in the plane.

  4. 4

    Painting over patches instead of priming them.

    This is what causes sheen flashing - uneven gloss across a finished wall. Raw spackle and joint compound are far more porous than the aged paint around them. Hyde puts it plainly: more porous surfaces soak up the paint and dry to a more matte finish, and drywall seams, patches and spackle absorb differently from the surrounding wall. Add thin film build or a broken wet edge and you get a wall you can read the repair map through. This is the entire technical reason a pro spot-primes every repair and full-primes a wall that has had real work done to it. It also gets worse with every step up in sheen.

  5. 5

    Scrubbing a flat or matte wall.

    Burnishing. Rubbing one spot polishes the film to a higher sheen, and now there is a shiny patch that is more obvious than the mark being cleaned. Benjamin Moore flags flat as prone to burnishing with frequent cleaning. Modern scrubbable matte resists stains dramatically better than traditional flat, but it does not resist burnishing nearly as well - that distinction gets lost in the marketing. Blot, do not scour.

  6. 6

    Skipping primer under a big color change.

    Hiding power comes overwhelmingly from titanium dioxide, which is white. Deep and ultra-deep bases carry far less of it to make room for colorant, so a deep red, a saturated navy or a strong yellow has almost no inherent hide and will want three or four coats over a light wall. A grey-tinted primer stepped toward the topcoat supplies the hide the base cannot, and one coat of tinted primer costs less than a third coat of deep-base premium paint. The same logic runs in reverse going light over dark.

  7. 7

    Assuming one brand's satin is another brand's satin.

    These names are not regulated or trademarked. Rodda states outright that the descriptive names change from company to company. Sherwin-Williams lumps flat and matte into one bucket and eggshell, satin and velvet into another. Benjamin Moore sells seven named interior finishes including Pearl, which sits between satin and semi-gloss and has no Sherwin-Williams equivalent at all. If you are matching existing paint on the same plane, match by MPI gloss level or by a meter reading - never by the word printed on the can.

Questions

What people actually ask.

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Is there actually a difference between flat and matte, or is that just marketing?

Both, and it is worth separating the two. The physical difference is real and measurable, and it lives at the grazing angle rather than straight on. MPI puts flat at 5 gloss units or less at 60 degrees and 10 maximum at 85 degrees. Matte is up to 10 at 60 degrees but 10 to 35 at 85. Face-on they look the same; light raking down a wall from a window is where matte shows its side sheen. The marketing part is the naming. Sherwin-Williams treats flat and matte as one category. Benjamin Moore sells them as distinct product lines with distinct recommendations. Both are right - the disagreement is in the words, not the physics. The difference that will actually affect your life is the resin: a modern scrubbable matte is a high-binder film that cleans far better than a traditional low-binder flat at the same gloss reading.

What sheen should my bathroom be?

Satin on the walls, semi-gloss on the trim, for most bathrooms. But you should know the sources disagree on this one. Sherwin-Williams recommends satin or semi-gloss for bathrooms because they withstand moisture. Benjamin Moore recommends matte, specifically Aura Bath & Spa, which is built as a scrubbable matte for mildew resistance in high humidity. Both positions are defensible in 2026. The old rule - semi-gloss because bathrooms are wet - is now partly obsolete, because dedicated bath products exist in matte that are engineered for humidity. So: satin for a family or kids bathroom, where it will get wiped a lot. A specialized matte bath product for a primary bath or powder room where appearance matters and ventilation is adequate. Semi-gloss on walls is over-shiny and mostly belongs on the trim now. Builder-grade flat is still the wrong answer.

Can I really use flat paint on walls?

Yes, and for two completely different reasons that get confused with each other. The cheap reason: builder-grade flat hides a Level 4 drywall finish inexpensively and touches up without flashing, which is why new-construction walls are flat. The expensive reason: flat and matte walls are a strong design preference because they read as pigment rather than plastic - flat absorbs light instead of reflecting it, so color reads deeper and more saturated and the wall reads as a surface rather than a coating. That is the same visual logic behind the limewash and mineral-paint trend. What made the second reason viable for real houses is scrubbable matte. Sherwin-Williams says modern flats no longer sacrifice durability, and Benjamin Moore says Regal Select Matte withstands frequent washing. The honest caveat: scrubbable matte is much better than traditional flat, but it is not eggshell. It resists stains better than it resists burnishing, and touch-up on any low sheen still flashes once the wall has aged.

Why does my wall look shiny in some spots and dull in others?

That is sheen flashing, and it is a porosity problem, not a paint-quality problem. Patched areas, drywall seams and spackle absorb paint differently from the aged film around them - the more porous spot drinks the coating and dries duller, so you end up able to read the repair map through the finish. The causes are consistent: unprimed or only partly primed patches, inconsistent primer coverage, not enough film build, and breaking the wet edge so one section starts drying before the next one meets it. The fix on a finished wall is to prime the whole plane and recoat it, which is why priming the patches in the first place is cheaper. Flashing also gets more visible with every step up in sheen.

Does the sheen change how my color looks?

Yes, in both directions, and deep colors are where it bites. A dark base reflects less diffuse light, so the mirror-like specular component becomes a much larger share of what your eye actually sees. The practical result: the same sheen looks glossier in a deep color than in an off-white. A satin navy reads close to semi-gloss; a satin greige reads close to eggshell. Pros compensate by dropping a sheen step when a color goes very dark. Higher sheen also raises perceived brightness by bouncing light around, which is why small and low-light rooms often get a step up in sheen - at the cost of flaw visibility. And the hardest combination to live with in residential painting is deep color in a low sheen: a flat charcoal shows every handprint and rub as a shiny burnish mark. It is also exactly what design magazines feature.

How do I know if my walls need a skim coat before painting?

Three things decide it together: the sheen, the color depth and the lighting. Not the paint. Level 4 drywall - tape embedded and coated, three coats over fasteners - is suitable for flat paints and light textures under what the Gypsum Association calls forgiving lighting. Level 5 adds a skim coat of joint compound across the entire wall surface, and National Gypsum specifies it for critical lighting conditions and for dark or non-flat paint colors. So if you want a deep color, or any sheen above flat, on a wall with a window on the same plane or a wall-wash fixture on it, you are asking for a Level 5 substrate whether anyone used that phrase or not. One detail that tells you the standard is serious: Level 5 inspection has to happen with the final lighting and window treatments in place. You cannot sign off a wall like that under a work light. The takeaway is simple - the paint can never be better than the wall underneath it, and the choices you make about color and sheen are also choices about prep.

Is one brand's satin the same as another brand's satin?

No, and this catches people out on touch-ups and additions. The sheen names are descriptive, not regulated. Rodda says plainly that the names change from company to company. Sherwin-Williams treats flat and matte as one bucket and eggshell, satin and velvet as another. Benjamin Moore sells seven named interior finishes and includes Pearl, which sits between satin and semi-gloss and has no direct Sherwin-Williams equivalent. So one brand's satin can be another brand's pearl or eggshell, and putting them next to each other on the same wall shows. If you are matching, match by MPI gloss level or a gloss-meter reading. If you cannot do that, bring in a sample of the existing finish and match the product line, not the word.

What sheen should kitchen cabinets be?

Semi-gloss is the standard and high gloss is the statement version, but the sheen is the smaller half of this decision. What makes a cabinet finish look like furniture instead of like paint is the product: a cabinet-grade urethane alkyd enamel, sprayed, sanded between coats and allowed to cure. Benjamin Moore Advance, Sherwin-Williams Emerald Urethane and INSL-X Cabinet Coat are in this class. The number that actually matters is the cure time, not the recoat time. Advance is recoatable at 16 hours and fully cures in up to 30 days. Emerald Urethane recoats in 4 hours and cures in about 30 days. Until a film cures it will block - stick to itself - so a cabinet door shut against its frame in week one can weld and tear when you open it. Plan on keeping doors open, reinstalling hardware carefully, and not scrubbing anything for a month.

How we work

Prep, one coat of primer, two coats of colour — and the prep levels that decide the price.

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The brands

Seven brands compared line by line. No favourites, and we say why.

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Sheen selector

Answer three questions about the room and get the sheen.

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