My clients often ask me if they can colour match the paint colours I’ve recommended with another paint company. The answer is yes, it can be done. However, there are a few things you want to consider before you try to match your paint colour.
I was in a client’s home the other day and she told me that she just found out last minute that her painter uses Sherwin-Williams. That mean she would need to get all the Benjamin Moore Colours from her eDesign renovation package matched.
To be clear, we will give you the colours you need in whatever paint system you’re using (as long as we have the fan decks). My system is entirely transferrable to other paint companies (provided the colours exist in their deck).
My client also confided that she loved the package so much because, in addition to the step-by-step plan she received, the entire process gave her a visual template inside her head for making all kinds of other colour decisions too.
And if you need to create a visual template for your project – this is exactly what my two-day workshop will do for you, too. Register here, the WOW boxes for April’s course are shipping this week.
Can I have these paint colours matched somewhere else?
Anyway, here’s the spiel I have given clients my entire career when they ask me if they can match their colours somewhere else:
Yes, you can have the paint colours I’ve selected for you matched with another paint company. But if you do, I cannot guarantee that the colours will be the same.
As a result, this often instills a fear of getting it WRONG in people’s heads and for good reason. I once had a client call me and declare that the red I had chosen to match the art in her dining room WAS WRONG.
So I drove over with my paint colours, held up the paint sample I had recommended and it WAS wrong. That’s because the painter had it colour matched with a cheaper paint and it was not a good match.
So yes, this error can definitely happen if you buy paint from a brand that is NOT the same as your paint chip.
But there are two sides to this argument and you just heard the first one.
Here’s the second one.
Did you choose the right paint colour in the first place?
If your budget would be better spent with another paint company or your painter prefers a different paint company. Sure, it’s possible to get a good colour match.
But there’s another common danger of doing colour matches.
What if you chose THE WRONG COLOUR TO BEGIN WITH. Let’s say that your painter gets it colour matched and then the colour looks wrong. Now, you’re blaming the other paint company, ie. and your painter is now wrong, maybe even technically liable. Yikes.
Here’s the thing. If you chose the right colour and the match isn’t perfect, it’s likely that the colour will still work because the undertone will probably be the same. Yay!
Having said that, I still need to caution you that lighter colours and neutrals need to be matched correctly. That’s because just a slight tweak one way or another will shift the undertone of a lighter colour in another direction.
So many people will flat out blame the colour match when really, maybe the colour just wasn’t right to begin with. Kind of like one of my students who mentioned in class that her paint colour looked wrong after she installed a skylight in her living room. I concluded that it likely had not been right to begin with, and the natural light that was added to the room (with the new skylight) simply enhanced the fact that the paint colour was wrong.
After learning my system, she agreed that I was probably right about that. And that’s why Understanding Undertones® is so IMPORTANT. More often than not, it’s the undertone that’s the culprit of a neutral paint colour gone wrong – NOT the lighting.
Something to consider.
If you love my Benjamin Moore VIP collection, stay tuned for my Sherwin-Williams VIP collection COMING SOON!
Have you ever had your paint colour matched somewhere else?
Paint companies definitely want you to believe their paint colours cannot be matched because, of course, they want to sell their OWN paint colours. And once again, it affirms that proper testing either with large painted colour boards like I sell or you make yourself is another critical step to getting your paint colour right.
Over to you my lovelies! I’d love to hear your colour-matching escapades. Do you agree with my assessment or what’s your take? What kind of experiences have you had with paint company colour matching?
If you’d like a list of the best neutrals and whites by undertone in Sherwin-Williams or Benjamin Moore, find them in either of my ebooks here.
Related posts:
5 Reasons Your Paint Colour Looks Wrong; It’s NOT the Lighting
I live in a rural area of Nova Scotia and have only a Home Hardware anywhere near me. I have a BM fan deck and colour match all the time without issue. I wouldn’t be as confident if I didn’t have the deck.
My builder used Sherwin Williams paint with a Ben Moore color, there is definitely a difference. It is a white but their bases are totally different. I have gradually repainted with the same color in BM paint.
A further twist worth mentioning is using a specific paint, say Benjamin Moore, and then attempting to touch up with the exact same paint a year or two later. It never, EVER matches what’s on the wall — I think due to a combination of the paint on the wall changing color over time and the new batch of paint being just the tiniest bit different. A painter gave me a tip — you can paint one wall, in a four-walled room, with very little noticeable difference, but you can not touch up a section of a wall w/o a glaring problem.
Several years ago we chose BM Winter Lake for our dining room. We had it matched in a sample size at Home Depot with Behr paint which is highly recommended by Consumer Reports and less expensive than BM. It was clearly not the same color as on the color strip, so we got a gallon at Benjamin Moore and of course it was perfect. I don’t know if the fact that we got it in a sample size was the issue, but we weren’t going to take any chances of being stuck with a gallon that was the wrong color. It’s not worth the money we would have saved. Since then I never color match across paint brands. I’m not taking any chances.
It is tricky but doable if you really take your time to experiment, test and decide. I had cross matched several times between Valspar, Behr, BM and SW with great results after lots of research and matching and analyzing paint samples over a few months.
U.K. paint company Mylands start the matching process with a spectrophotometer (if that’s the right instrument!), then finish by hand with great results. The guy in my local Crown paint shop is also brilliant and will finish by hand if he’s not satisfied. And I have found Lakeland Paints (branded Ecos in North America) to be excellent at paint matching. But the firm was founded by a chemist who is really hands on. By contrast, Dulux (sorry Dulux) created a match for me digitally, and it was washed out and actually unpleasant looking. So apart from cheap bases (which none of these companies use) I think an expert hand and eye is key to a good result.
Maria, this is a FABULOUS post!
As color consultants, we are so precise in the colors that you pick, and they can go really wrong fast. We had a client in a very expensive new build. Our recommendation for her walls, ceilings, trim was Benjamin Moore Simply White. We strongly warned her not to paint match but her painter was incredibly persuasive.
The painter ended up matching, and the next week she called to tell me her walls were green, and asked if that is what I had meant to do. I went to her house and we found the Sherwin Williams match in the garage. Her painter SWORE the color looked perfect, and that Simply had a green undertone. We took Maria’s Simply White board, and then painted a large poster board with Simply White. Yup, it was the wrong color. A $10,000 mistake. He had matched all the other colors specified in the house, and they weren’t even close. They ended up negotiating the price and he redid the project.
If you do need to color match, make sure that you get the painter’s agreement in writing that if the color is off, they will redo it without charge. Don’t pay them until you check to see if the color is correct, after it has dried. And don’t let the painter’s parting words be – looks great, it will look more like the color when it dries.
Great advice. We had a Dulux paint matched to BM Classic Gray and I was pleasantly surprised by the quality of the match. I did check the color match BEFORE the painting was done as I had gotten burned on my exterior color matches not meeting my expectations. That was MY FAULT for not understanding the undertones, and working with small swatches of color. I had learned my lesson at that point in my new build 😉
Exact same thing happened to me – Sherwin William’s base is different than Benjamin Moore’s base and Simply White has so little pigment it really matters! I could never get the painter or the remodeling company to agree it was wrong until they brought in the shiplap painted correctly and then it was undeniable. By then my husband had already repainted most of the condo. (Yes, I’m married to a wonderful man.)
My new home was painted with General Paint. I loved the colours, so I had them colour matched with BM. You couldn’t tell where the old paint ended and the new began. Perhaps, it was good luck.
In a previous home, I needed to paint one wall due to nail pops ( new build ) and because it was just the one, you couldn’t tell if there was a slight difference.
So far my experience has been good but I do realize that the base white can have slight differences.
When we moved out west, we hired a painter who told us that he dealt with Color Your World which we weren’t familiar with. I told him that I wanted to match the colour of the paint to a swatch of fabric that I had; he then instructed me to ask for “can’t remember her name”; she was the manager of the store. This dedicated lady kept working at matching the colour, saying “not right” or “getting close” etc. between attempts. She gave me a small quantity of paint to bring home and try on different walls. We ended up with a perfect match. She had an excellent eye for colour.
Thank you for this advice.
If I pick out a BM color and don’t want to pay the price, I go to Home Depot and I only use one person. She mixes the color by looking at the BM color and not by HD’s formula. I never use anyone else but her. If she quits, then I go to BM for sure. I’ve once used another person at HD, out of desperation, and no, they don’t know how to do this. They go by the formula and it isn’t correct.
Sample paints do not have the correct pigment to sign off on them. A good salesperson will tell you this and they are correct.
That is true.
We are dealing with this very subject today! I realized about a month ago that the color match we did on my kitchen window was a bit too yellow and now we have to repaint all the doors, windows, door and window casings a coat of the correct color all because of paint matching in another brand.
Using your color system from reading your eBooks, we had originally chosen Benjamin Moore Oxford White as a match to our new kitchen cabinets and took it to Lowes to have it color matched in Valspar paint. How wonderful that they had the paint match in the Valspar brand right in the computer! Haha to me is all I can say about this one.
First of all, I did something wrong during the color matching process. Since I didn’t think there were samples of Benjamin Moore paint in the store, I used the paint swatch to match it to my cabinets and I never painted the color on a piece of poster board to compare. After realizing that I needed to repaint 6 doors,4 bifold doors, 15 windows and two entrance doors again, I went to the store that carried Benjamin Moore paint and asked if they had small paint can samples. Well, indeed they did, and I got samples in BM Chantilly Lace, BM Oxford White and SW reflective White because I knew from using your colour Wheel that my kitchen cabinets are indeed a true white color. looking at the tiny paint samples just doesn’t show the difference in hue like a piece of posterboard can so that’s why I bought all three true white paint samples.
There is something to be said about painting a piece of posterboard, because Chantilly Lace was the best match but there was a hint of pink in it compared to my kitchen cabinets that drove me a little crazy being the perfectionist that I am, and although SW High reflective White was close, it was a tad too light, so my husband took one of the cabinet doors to Sherwin Williams and they used the Spectrophotometer to scan the cabinet. He brought the can of paint home, and I painted my posterboard the custom color they made, compared it to my cabinets and it was perfect!
My other lesson was that the color match Lowes had for Benjamin Moore Oxford White in the Valspar line missed the mark completely.
They are nowhere near similar, and I’ve got the painted poster boards to prove it! Also, if I would’ve painted the BM Oxford White on a piece of posterboard or even better yet, had a set of Maria’s large colour boards, I would’ve known the Oxford White was not a good match to my cabinets in the first place. I will never take a paint sample to a paint store and have it matched in another brand again. Period. Lesson learned.
Hi Maria, I choose SW INCREDIBLE WHITE for my main bathroom that has pure white subway tiles. My inspiration was your bathroom. I wanted to have it color matched in BM paint because I felt it would be simpler to stay with the company that I have used for years throughout my house. The associate at BM said he could color match but he recommended that I go to SW to make sure it would be perfect. I was very impressed with his honesty. I did go to SW & I love the results. BM color match may have been OK but I am very happy with SW color & I didn’t want to take a chance on color matching. I am especially happy with the customer service I received from my BM sales person .
I’ve painted the interiors of my past 3 homes myself (ceilings, walls, trim), and have experience with getting Home Depot and Lowes in the USA to match paint colors from another company. I’ve learned that there are 3 reasons why you might not get an exact match: (1) employee dedication and experience, (2) changes in base color formulation, (3) paint machine calibrations.
I never leave the store without having them put a dot of the paint they’ve mixed onto my sample chip and waiting until it dries to make sure that the color is an exact match. It helps if the store’s employee is competent and dedicated to getting the color right. Sometimes the paint department is short staffed so they pull in an employee from another department who has limited experience and little motivation to tweak the color to achieve an exact match. I usually ask them to mix up a sample jar, take it home and try it out, then return with the label from the sample jar to use to mix a gallon can.
Paint companies change the formulas of their base paints periodically, so if you go back a year later with the lid from the old paint can and they program the machine to dispense the same amount of color without checking that the base paint formula is the same, you end up with paint that isn’t an exact match.
Once I asked Home Depot to mix BM Cloud White in Behr paint, and when the first color wasn’t an exact match, the dedicated employee discovered that their computer had different recipes for mixing that color – probably based on past changes in base color formulation in both BM and Behr. He was willing to experiment, and hit on the right recipe to match my color chip.
Sometimes their color machines haven’t been calibrated recently and a fraction of a drop of too much of any one color can throw off the final product. I recall once watching the paint machine dribble one teeny tiny drop of black into the can after it had already dispensed the squirt of color mix – and sure enough, the blue paint was darker than the paint chip.
So, yes, in my experience you can match paint colors from different companies. You just have to do your due diligence to make sure it is an exact match before you leave the store, a step the professionals may skip.
Maria,
My painter took my Benjamin Moore Simply White sample and had it matched at PPG paints. While PPG said they had the exact paint formula, Benjamin Moore said the white base they used was not the same. The color was still beautiful and close so I didn’t have a breakdown but It would have been a huge problem if I’d been matching existing trim. I’ve even had a sample made up in the cheaper “Ben” paint and it doesn’t match their own more expensive “Regal” paint. Paint matching is a risky little game and it’s crazy to be mad at the painter or the paint store. This is why I’ve always listened to your advice to never change the strength of the color. In my experience, if you start asking for things at 75% or 50% strength you’re never getting that right again.
Also, here’s something that we amateurs are dealing with: We pick a light color in a slightly iffy undertone (we only know because of you) but it’s beautiful and we hope it will work because our friends can’t even see an undertone and the paint store and the internet are telling us the color is “REALLY NEUTRAL and will rarely pull any green/pink etc.” But even if all that was true, the color match has managed to slightly intensify that iffy undertone. We picked the wrong color.
I can understand painters trying to increase their profits by using cheaper paint than specified—however reprehensible. But can’t you buy the paint you want and tell the painter to use it? What are they doing, tacking a hefty surcharge onto the cheap paint they purchase?
When I had our new kitchen and new trim painted, I specified a custom color for the white trim (matched the subway tile and was so beautiful I used it throughout the house). I think the painter picked it up from the store I specified. (He wasn’t what I would call ethical either, charging me the same hourly rate for his lowly assistants as he charged for himself. With two assistants I wouldn’t be surprised if his own rate, after he paid them, was twice the figure he stated.)
With the cabinet makers, I specified BM Chantilly Lace and only found out later that they had used SW paint and color matched. It looks a little different but is okay because different whites (in correct undertones) add depth, IMHO. But my tolerance for any deviation from what I specify is now zero.
Usually painters want to stick with a brand because they are very experienced with it and get the best results from it. I’m not a professional painter, just a very experienced diy-er, and switching brands is hell. It’s thicker or thinner, it doesn’t coat the brush right, it doesn’t edge right.
It’s comparable to being a pc user and having to do a project on a Mac. The pc user can probably get it done, but it’s going to take a lot longer with maybe worse results.
Dunn Edwards pays a rebate to painters so a lot of guys are loyal to DE for that around here. Plus recently because of the freeze in Texas in 2021, chemicals were unavailable to make the bases. One of my clients had to get 4 quarts of the last bath and spa BM paint in a city 30 minutes away because the store selling BM a mile away was out. Supply chain stuff has been insane since 3/2020.
Exactly! If you’re using a professional they paint EVERYDAY and know what they are working with. Say “paint is paint” all you want, but it isn’t true. And why go to all the work for agonizing over the colour, prepping your home for paint, putting things all back together and being unhappy with the result. Trying to save a few hundred dollars now won’t likely be worth it in the long run. Scuffs and touchups are inevitable, whatever you do, don’t “spot” touch up, re-roll the entire wall no matter which paint.
Yes you can buy your own paint and hire someone willing to use what you bought, but some of these companies want to use their own because they say they don’t want to be responsible if the color is not what you wanted or the quality is off, according to them, and others just plain want to charge more for the paint and job, and even include clauses on the contract to save themselves from possible disputes or litigations.
Maria
Speaking of color matching. A warning about painted cabinets.
I just discovered that the cabinets in our 4 year old build use a custom blend and curing process to paint our off white kitchen cabinets at the factory. We are starting to get a bit of pitting and chipping that so far has been fixable with a touch up pen they supplied. What I discovered is they will sell you some paint, but that you can’t use it to repaint because it needs to go through their curing process.
Also, they won’t repaint doors for us. This has been very stressful. Our kitchen faces south, and every small defect really shows. We have to treat the cabinets like they are really fragile, and be super careful. Much of the wear is on the doors below the sink. We have shakers, and water drips get between the frame and flat portion of the door at the bottom of the door.
We had no other choices in this semi custom home, but I wish the cabinets had been painted a name brand color like SW or BM.
At this point the only options I see down the road is to order new doors when the paint wears to the point where it’s unacceptable, or to spend 12,000.00 to have the kitchen repainted. Of course at some point they may discontinue this color, making ordering replacement doors no longer an option.
Maria, do you (or any followers here) have an easier of less expensive solution to my dilemma? Maria, as a proponent of painted cabinets, would you be willing to do a post about painting and maintenance?
We will be ordering new doors to replace those under the sink when they develop too much wear, and store them in the meantime. We are going to order flat front doors, in order to eliminate the issue with the water between the flat surface and frame of the shaker style.
Could you remove the doors and lay them flat and paint them yourself? I’ve had great success priming cabinet frames and cabinet doors with BIN, the shellac based primer, and then using BM Advance. Looks very professional.
Just buy an extra EXTRA set of doors for under the sink and keep it on hand. A lot cheaper than $12,000. That factory finish may also need to be looked at by the sales rep if there’s pitting. Factories were dealing with COVID and working at 25% capacity, so not sure if that had anything to do with the problem. That factory curing process should keep your cabinets easier to maintain, but water at the sink is usually not covered under warranty. Call the manufacturer and ask for the sales rep to come to your house and see it in person regardless.
Hi Katherine,
We just bought a new white shaker kitchen, and the same thing is happening to us. It took us an entire year to get doors that didn’t have paint defects and now we’re noticing the paint is coming off the edge of the face frame and we have to treat our kitchen like a baby’s bottom. The company gave us a touch-up pen and when I had a conniption over it, a small sample can of paint for touch ups. The paint in the can is actually thinner and looks more like a stain to me (because the cabinets are sprayed) and if you read the label, the company strongly recommends that you buy their topcoat (polyurethane) as well. The polyurethane is the topcoat (clear coat) which protects the color from rubbing off and moisture. Without it, the touch-up pen and paint are useless.
I would suggest you take a cabinet door to your local Sherwin Willimas and have them scan your cabinet door with a spectrophotometer. We did this with our cabinets and the color is perfect. We tried taking our cabinet doors to Lowes to do the same thing and we didn’t get a good match. I don’t know if it’s their equipment or the fact that Sherwin Willimas is a paint store that deals in paint only and they have the know-how to get it done right but from now on when I need color matching I’m headed there. We are thrilled with the results!
I think good color matchers are the needle in the haystack. The computers get close but without an extremely skilled human, you won’t get there. Companies all have different bases and different pigments.
I once had to color match a job against my will and it took four tries with an experienced color matcher. The neutrals were the toughest. So I used to tell my clients don’t do it, period, end of letter.
And then I have another problem…Two paint companies with the same paint colour name. The previous owner forgot which paint brand they used but remembered the paint name. Our house is obviously two different colours and it shows badly where they did touch ups for resale. Personally I can’t understand how they didn’t realise given one is a blue grey and the other is a green grey. We are in the process of repainting now.
I needed paint to do touch ups on walls that were painted 20 yrs ago with Pratt & Lambert Moselle. Unfortunately P&L left Canada, and with Covid I could not get across the border to go to an American store. But knowing that SW bought P&L a few years ago, I thought they might share pigments etc. In any case, the clerk at SW used the spectrophotometer to match the colour and then hand finished it. It’s a perfect match and no matter what angle you look at the wall from, you can’t see the touch ups I did on the repaired areas. On the other hand, trying to save money, I previously tried to have P&L matched at Canadian Tire, and while it’s close, it’s just not quite right. As a rule, I prefer to get paint mixed in the originating brand.
Maria, if I may, I’d like to give another perspective on this issue. My experience has been that it’s usually about the expense of the brand name that entices a cross brand color match. Here in SoCal, just about every brand in the paint market place is available, if one is willing to expend the effort to secure it. If the wall paint color is a major element in a design scheme, it really needs to be right. There’s no almost perfect. As a designer, most likely I’ve gone to a lot of effort to create the design relying a specific color. If I’ve chosen a color from a top brand like Benjamin Moore, it’s for a very specific reason. In BM’s case, even an “ordinary” color is “different” and “interesting” (watch out for undertones just like you said!) because of their system of colorants. I always prepare my client’s to expect to pay more for these paints and provide large paint samples, yours or my own, for testing so they are as confident as I am in the results. If the painter that they think they want to hire throws up roadblocks or excuses for not using the specified manufacturer, I caution them that they may want to look further for a painting contractor that is willing and familiar with the brand. If a client has expended the effort and the expense of hiring a designer, compromising on the cost of the paint may not be the place to risk a less than perfect outcome. Then again, not all people are as sensitive to color nuance as some and they would rather save the money!
Not to mention even within the same paint brand, different lines will result in slightly different colors. I had painted most of my common areas SW Agreeable Gray at 50%. I hired a painter to handle the stairs and open hallway upstairs and gave him what was left in the gallon I had. He ended up getting the color and intensity in the pro painter version, which looked fine on entire walls, but when I went to touch up with my left over paint (the gallon I had bought; he didn’t leave me anything when he was done) after I installed trim, I discovered a slight difference in the color. No one else seems to notice, but I notice, and will be painting the upstairs hallway
To solve the problem of not getting the colour right, when I had our family room etc.,painted I bought the paint myself in the brand and colour I wanted. I would not let the painter get the paint as they may be good at painting but are not expert at colour matching.
I love Farrow & Ball colors. But F & B is not available locally. So I thought I was safe in having SW color match paint for my bathroom. It was beautiful but it didn’t have the nuance that F & B offers. I should have ordered the F & B paint online because they offer free shipping. Lesson learned.
The cabinet maker my remodeler uses had never even heard of F&B. I was willing to pay the extra price, etc. but they said I would have to provide a color sample for color matching to SW. No way could they match the nuances of a beautiful paint they never heard of. Maria is the best teacher by the way. I think about undertones all the time!
my painter just tried to color match a Farrow and Ball color to BM. It was a pretty pearly color that turned yellow. it was awful. the paint i picked matched perfectly, because i used the new color wheel!
I’ve lived in 3 different homes and had them all painted, some rooms more than once! One thing I learned from my trusted painter is that painters often get a discount or some type of referral fee where they buy their paint, especially if they’re buying in volume. Or sometimes it’s a matter of convenience….they’ve become used to a certain provider, have developed a good relationship with them, and it makes things easier all around for them to keep going to the same place. I totally get that but even so, I always insisted on sticking with the paint company whose colours I selected, and even checked each can to see which base was used and which paint store they came from! (I was very nice about it.) It became an ongoing joke between me and my painter and both of us were always happy with the outcome. I learned from attending a BM seminar that some colours have the tiniest bit of many colours used to make up the final colour, so it’s easy to see why it’s tricky to colour match. And, of course, the base used can make a big difference. If you’re really picky (like I am), best not to try and colour match unless for some reason it’s the only option.
I learned the hard way that the base paint for the small sample jars was different than the base for the ‘real’ paint, and that made the sample color not a good representation of what I would get when I bought the gallons for painting. Dunno if that’s still the case, but I would not buy sample jars again, but get a quart, or pint if available, of the ‘real’ paint.
I heard it is the same base but not all additives are added to them.
This is so true! It’s a hard lesson to learn if you need to touch up paint that is several years old. I only use Kelley Moore paint after trying every other paint out there, I just won’t use anything else but loved a SW color Sea Salt. It did not color match the same. I lived with my more greenish bedroom knowing that it should have read different but learned an important lesson. I would have chosen a KM color over using SW paint. It’s just an inferior paint.
Hello Everyone, I’ve colour matched paint many times (to other paints & wallpapers) and usually get a gallon of the ‘newly mixed’ paint to sample against what I’m looking for before going ahead with a project….any paint not matched to my liking gets donated to the local HS drama dept…..I’m not married to any brand but use FB, BM and Fine Paints of Europe for most projects but love SW Duration for outdoor work. But I have a query, with so many commenters perhaps someone knows this…hopefully Maria does….I’d venture to say all paints change colour over time…sun, natural & artificial lights effect the underlying chemicals….some manufacturers (BM Aura, for example) claim they hold the colour….does anyone have experience with paint brands that stay ‘true’ to their original colour the longest…have the least amount of change. I know the amount of exposure plays a big part but assuming all things being equal, is there a specific brand (not colour) whose colour lasts longest? When painting woodwork with Oil paint…an unthankful costly job…I’d wish there was one I could count on….for easy touch-ups as opposed to having to paint the entire room. Thank you.
I read good things about the stability of F&B pigments several years ago. I can’t quite remember where, but it wasn’t a decor mag/blog, it was an industry journal. Something I found through the KBIS we have in North America every year, the website has a blog about upcoming shows and who is coming. Somehow, there was link in their blog article to an industry journal that had interviewed some F& B folks. I think that should be what you research, what pigments are used and how stable they have been tested to be. Pigment source and amount varies greatly, not just from cheap brand to expensive brand but also among brands costing about the same.
Consumer Reports tests color change. Everyone should buy a digital membership to CR. Consider it a $40 annual donation for consumer rights, given so many “reviews” and “recommendations” today are sponsored/bought/biased. We need someone, somewhere objectively testing things. https://www.consumerreports.org/cro/paints/buying-guide/index.htm
I’ve had it happen once when the client was trying to save money many years ago. I had told them the color matches may not be perfect. We had lots of saturated colors and they called me back very disappointed. The colors matches were way off, and, to make matters worse they hired an inexpensive contractor. So the money they spent with me, on the paint and the labor was all a waste. I always ask clients if they prefer a certain brand, and I will use that brand when specifying (providing I have that fan deck).
My favorite BM store was out of Advance that I was using to paint our baseboards last year. I found a couple of cans at a different store but they recommended I have it tinted at the store I normally buy from because their machines might be calibrated a little differently from theirs and even a tiny bit would make a difference in Chantilly Lace.
It’s not just driven by painters wanting to switch brands, it can be driven by wanting healthing paints than the name brands have available.
We don’t have a Benjamin Moore dealer in my town, so I use Sherwin Williams for all my projects. I’ve had pretty good luck matching BM colors to Sherwin Williams by asking the paint store to just pull up the formula in their system. I don’t color match a paint chip, I have them use the color formula that they already have to match that specific color. Not sure if that would work to match a SW color at a BM store, but my SW store has been able to match BM colors by name and number.
I still paint up a large sample board to test of course. I then use this custom sample board to compare to my BM color board from Maria against a white background. If the undertone is the same and the color value is close enough then I’m good to go.