(Or for our Pig-Latin speaking friends: Ix-nay on eeling-say ite-whay.)
Please don’t ever agree to use something called “ceiling white” on your ceiling. Horrifyingly, Benjamin Moore actually makes a color called “ceiling white.” (I’m not going to give you the number, because you should never use it. I won’t even dignify it with capital letters.)
Don’t leave it to the painter; give him or her an actual color name. If you’ve chosen an off-white for your trim color, a safe bet is to use the same color in a flat finish on the ceiling. Billy Baldwin used to add some of the wall color to white for his ceilings. Took the edge off, he said.
You shouldn’t be afraid to wrap the wall color – especially if it’s light – onto the ceiling. It will look different on the horizontal and vertical planes.
And using different colors that have the same value (intensity) on the walls and the ceiling gives you an interesting but cohesive look –
A friend’s mother got carried away with the paint colors in her home’s basement apartment, and she painted virtually every plane a different pastel, including the ceilings. Remarkably, it worked. She declared, “I will never, EVER, paint a ceiling white again.”
Amen, sister.
Pictures by Eric Roth, taken from “Susan Sargent’s The Comfort of Color.“