Paint Picks for 2011

Paint colors tend to trend.  If you kind of think back to the 70s don't you conjure up images of gold carpet, avacado sinks and orange couches?  I'm a little vague on the 60s (somehow blue comes to mind) - but my house was built in the 1950s and when we moved in here our bathroom sink was pink, black and white were popular, as were pastel's of yellow, blue, and lavendar (I have another friend who had a lavendar sink in her 1950s ranch house).  The 80s were lots of pinks and greens or peach and mint, sometimes mauve and blue.  Some day we'll look back on this decade with some sort of definitive ideas about what colors it brings to mind.  In the meantime, each year within a decade has it's own trends.  Sometimes those trends stick around for a season, a year, or two - sometimes longer. 

So though there were predictions at the beginning of the year about what this years trends would be - really, those predictions are based on trying to push an agenda.  It's often what fashion designers, home decor, paint companies and dye companies would like us to start trending towards.  But sometimes reality doesn't quite match up with what we're really drawn to.  As I save images on the computer, it's easy for me to see the trends.  This year I can attest the colors you see in that image above are definitely THE trends in color.  And of those two are seen more often than any - and that is the two shades of blue (and some slight variations on those shades) and gray.  Next after those I would say is Orange.  Followed by purple and then yellow.  Though I see that bold yellow used as an accent color with some of the others (notably gray and blue) very frequently.  So I thought for the next few posts I'd devote some space to these colors specifically.

So to start off, one of my favorite colors for a few years now Tiffanyesque (there are quite a lot of variations on the shade, but at the end of the day they all have a slight resemblance to a Tiffany box).  I saw a recent scientific study on the psychology of color which said that this color is the one that tends to make women the happiest from a physiological stand-point (which bears in mind the question - does it just make us happier and somehow Tiffany & Co. managed to use this is a their signature color?  Or does it make us happy because it reminds us of those infamous "little blue boxes"?)