Shades of White

Shades of White

Shades of white are colors that differ only slightly from pure white. Variations of white include what are commonly termed off-white colors, which may be considered part of a neutral color scheme or yellow that looks like brown. In color theory, a shade is a pure color mixed with black (or having a lower lightness). Strictly speaking, a "shade of white" would be a neutral grey. This article is also about off-white colors that vary from pure white in hue, and in chroma (also called saturation, or intensity). Colors often considered "shades of white" include cream, eggshell, ivory, Navajo white, and vanilla. Even the lighting of a room, however, can cause a pure white to be perceived as off-white.Off-white colors were pervasively paired with beiges in the 1930s, and especially popular again from roughly 1955 to 1975. In terms of paint, off-white paints are now becoming more popular, with Benjamin Moore having 152 shades of off-whites, Behr having 167, and PPG has 315.Whiteness measures the degree to which a surface is white in colorimetry.

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