How many coats is two coats?
Why a colour looks wrong at one coat and right at three, and how to know before you buy the paint.
A tin says “two coats”. A wall disagrees, often. The reason is simple, and it is the same reason the walls on this site paint themselves in as you scroll.
A coat of paint is a thin film, and a film hides what is behind it only partly. Each coat lets a fraction of the wall below show through. Lay a second coat and that fraction shrinks again — but it never reaches zero. The colour you see is the paint and the old wall, together, in a ratio that changes with every coat.
So a strong colour over a pale wall reads muddy at one coat, closer at two, and only settles at three. A pale colour over a dark wall can take four. The number on the tin assumes a mid-grey primer and good conditions; your wall is rarely either.
What is behind the colour — bare plaster, an old dark wall, a grey primer? That, not the colour itself, decides how many tins you need.
The fix decorators use is a grey primer. A neutral, mid-value ground gives every colour the same start, so the coats behave predictably and a saturated colour stops greening or pinking through from the wall it replaced.
We proof the final colour on your actual walls, over the primer that will be used, at the coat count it will actually get — not on a paint chip held up to the window. A chip is one coat on white card. It is never what you will live with.
Get your colours proofed on the wall
We come to the room, read the light, and specify the scheme to a paint reference — with the coats counted.