Colour · September 17, 2026
The 2027 Colours of the Year Are Landing — and Six Brands Just Disagreed
Celery, Grounded, Cottage Door, Artifact, Deep Rooted, Rose Earth. Six paint brands have named their 2027 colour, Benjamin Moore and Pantone haven't, and only two of the six belong on a north-facing Toronto wall.
Sherwin-Williams named Celery on 15 September. Three weeks before that, Behr picked a mossy olive it called Grounded. Six paint brands have now put a 2027 Colour of the Year on the table, and the interesting part isn't that they disagree — it's how narrowly they disagree.
Who has picked what so far
| Brand | 2027 colour | What it actually is |
|---|---|---|
| Sherwin-Williams (and HGTV Home) | Celery SW 6421 | Soft, muted green with yellow undertones |
| Behr | Grounded | Mossy olive with brown in it |
| Valspar | Cottage Door | Greyed blue with warm undertones |
| Glidden | Artifact | Smoky blue |
| Dutch Boy | Deep Rooted | Earthy orange |
| Graham & Brown | Rose Earth | Clay-toned dusty pink |
Benjamin Moore and Pantone hadn't announced when I wrote this. Benjamin Moore usually lands later in the autumn. Pantone typically arrives in December, and it's a different kind of pick — a fashion and graphics colour that happens to get painted on walls by people who didn't read the fine print.
Four cool colours, two earths, and not one clean shade
Line them up and the pattern shows immediately. Three of the six are green or green-adjacent, two are blue, one is orange, one is pink — and every single one is a dirty colour. Nothing bright. Nothing clean. Not a saturated primary in the set.
The genuinely new note is the yellow-green. Celery and Grounded are both pulling in a direction the last three years of colour forecasting mostly avoided: an herbal, slightly acidic green that reads as garden rather than forest. The earths — Deep Rooted and Rose Earth — are less a new idea than a continuation. They're the same warm-brown story that ran through 2026, dialled up in chroma. If you want the longer version of where that came from, I wrote about it in the 2026 colour trends piece.
What a Colour of the Year is actually for
It's a marketing programme. That's not a criticism — it's just what it is, and knowing that makes it more useful, not less.
Here's the mechanic. A brand commits to a colour 12 to 18 months before you hear about it, then builds a season of paint chips, palette cards, retail displays, and partner collections around it. Everybody's forecasting team is reading the same inputs: textile mills, furniture fairs, fashion, what sold last year. So the picks cluster. When six brands independently land on muted, desaturated, mid-value colours, that isn't six opinions — it's one forecast with six labels on it.
What it does not tell you is what to paint. A colour of the year knows nothing about your window orientation, your floor, or the sofa you're not replacing.
Celery in a Toronto room: where it works and where it doesn't
Celery is the pick I'd be most careful with here, and it's the one people will ask about most.
Toronto north light is cool and blue-heavy for roughly five months of the year. A yellow-green painted across a large north-facing wall loses its yellow in that light and slumps toward grey — and a slumped yellow-green looks unwell in a way a slumped blue never does. I've watched it happen on a sample board in a Riverdale living room in February and the client's face said everything.
Where it earns its place:
- Millwork, not walls. A kitchen island, a run of built-ins, the inside of a bookcase. Smaller surface, lit from more than one direction, and the colour stays lively.
- West and south rooms. Afternoon light puts the yellow back in. This is where Celery actually looks like the press photo.
- Small rooms you pass through. A powder room or a mudroom can take a colour that would exhaust you in a living room.
Pair it with warm white trim rather than a cool white, white oak, unlacquered brass, and one clay-toned textile. Skip chrome and skip a bright white ceiling — both make it read acidic.
The two earths do more work in a Canadian winter
Rose Earth and Deep Rooted are the safer picks of the six here, for a boring reason: warm mid-tones absorb grey light instead of fighting it. A clay pink on a north wall in January still looks like a decision. A pale green on the same wall looks like a mistake.
Deep Rooted needs more restraint. An earthy orange at full-room scale is a commitment most people regret by the second winter — put it on a single joinery run, a door, or a fireplace surround and let the walls stay quiet.
The two mistakes I keep pulling people out of
Testing on one wall, in one light. A brushed patch straight onto an existing wall is contaminated by whatever colour is underneath it. Paint two coats on a 2-foot square of primed cardstock instead, then move it around the room: 8 a.m., 3 p.m., and again at 9 p.m. under your actual lamps. Most colour regret is a lighting problem wearing a paint costume.
Committing the biggest surface first. The largest plane in the room should carry the colour you feel least strongly about. Save the strong opinion for the thing you can repaint in an afternoon. If you want a low-risk way to test one of these six, colour capping gives you a band of it at the ceiling line for the cost of a sample pot.
None of these six colours will be wrong in 2027. Several of them will be wrong in your room, which is a different question entirely — and the only one that matters. If you want a second pair of eyes on a palette before the deposit goes down on twelve litres of anything, interior styling covers exactly that, or book a consultation and bring your fan deck and your floor plan.
People also ask
- What is the 2027 Colour of the Year?
- There isn't one — each paint brand names its own. As of mid-September 2026, six have announced: Sherwin-Williams and HGTV Home by Sherwin-Williams chose Celery SW 6421, a soft muted green with yellow undertones; Behr chose Grounded, a mossy olive; Valspar chose Cottage Door, a greyed blue; Glidden chose Artifact, a smoky blue; Dutch Boy chose Deep Rooted, an earthy orange; and Graham & Brown chose Rose Earth, a clay-toned pink.
- Has Benjamin Moore announced its 2027 colour of the year?
- Not as of mid-September 2026. Benjamin Moore usually announces later in the autumn, and Pantone's Colour of the Year typically arrives in December. Pantone's pick is also worth treating differently: it's chosen for fashion, product, and graphics first, and it isn't matched to a paint line the way a brand's own colour is.
- Why do paint brands pick different colours of the year?
- Because each one is a marketing programme built on its own forecasting, its own customer data, and its own colour library. Brands lock in their pick roughly 12 to 18 months ahead, reading the same cultural signals but weighting them differently. The useful information isn't any single colour — it's the direction all six point in together.
- Should I paint a room the colour of the year?
- Not because it's the colour of the year. These picks are a decent read on where the market is heading, not a recommendation for your specific room, your light, or your furniture. If a colour genuinely suits the space, the announcement changes nothing about whether it's right — it just means the matching cushions will be easy to find for about eighteen months.
- Does Celery work in a north-facing room?
- It's the hardest place to make it work. Toronto's north light runs cool and blue-heavy from November through March, which pulls the yellow out of a yellow-green and can leave it looking grey and slightly unwell across a large wall. Celery does much better in a west- or south-facing room, or used on millwork and cabinetry where the surface is smaller and lit from more than one direction.
- What colour is Rose Earth?
- Graham & Brown describes it as a dusty pink drawn from Italian clay — closer to a warm terracotta neutral than to a pastel. In practice it behaves like a mid-tone earth colour rather than a pink: it holds up under grey winter light, and it sits comfortably next to walnut, unlacquered brass, and warm whites.
