![[OC] Two-thirds of America's 26,597 paint colors are duplicates — I compared every brand's palette with the color-difference standard paint factories use](https://preview.redd.it/2na26kr4dwah1.jpeg?auto=webp&s=2d9f9f4011da47f40af6315ddc3c8d45decd46dc)
[OC] Two-thirds of America's 26,597 paint colors are duplicates — I compared every brand's palette with the color-difference standard paint factories use
Data: the PaintColorHQ database — 26,597 paint colors across 13 brands (12 decorative paint brands + the RAL classic standard), snapshot July 2026. Color values come from each brand's published palette data.
Method: CIEDE2000 (ΔE 2000) color difference computed across cross-brand pairs. I counted a color as "duplicated" when another brand sells a twin under ΔE 1.0 — that's below the threshold most people can distinguish even with the two swatches side by side. It's the same formula paint manufacturers use on the factory line for batch quality control.
Results: 66.6% of colors have at least one such twin at a competing brand. 749 hex values are exact, digit-for-digit copies sold under different names. The most duplicated color is a warm off-white sold by 12 of the 13 brands — Benjamin Moore's "Flurry" and Dunn-Edwards' "Swan White" are numerically identical (ΔE 0.00), and Farrow & Ball's "Pointing" is in the same cluster.
Tool: Python + matplotlib. Each strip is the brand's entire palette sorted by hue; the white bar under each strip is the share of the palette no other brand sells near-identically.
Full write-up with the per-brand tables and methodology: https://www.paintcolorhq.com/blog/most-duplicated-paint-color
