Four promises on the can, three numbers inside it
Stand in front of the paint aisle and every can is making you a promise. Paint and primer in one. One coat. A lifetime warranty. A famous name across the front.
Four promises, and not one of them tells you what is actually inside the can. Three numbers do. They are printed on a sheet the manufacturer publishes for every paint it sells, and that sheet is not on the can.
On three premium interior paints from three different companies, one of those numbers runs from forty to forty-six percent. F27 F28 F29 That spread decides how much of what you paid for is still on the wall once the water has dried off.
By the end of this you will know who owns the names in the aisle, which four promises to stop paying for, and the three numbers to read before you pay for a gallon.
If these are the stories you want, subscribe: there is a new one every day. And leave a like, it tells YouTube who else should see this.
One more thing before we start.
1873: the first ready-mixed paint
For most of the nineteenth century, paint was not something you bought ready to use. You bought pigment and oil and you mixed it yourself, or a painter mixed it for you.
In 1866, in Cleveland, Ohio, Henry Sherwin and Edward Williams started the company that still carries their two names. F37
In 1873 it put on sale an oil paint called Guaranteed Strictly Pure Raw Umber in Oil, which the company describes as the first ready-mixed paint. F38 Four years later it patented something every one of us has pried open with a screwdriver: the resealable paint can. F39
In 1883, in Brooklyn, two brothers named Benjamin and Robert Moore started a paint business with two thousand dollars and a single product. F41
And in 1947, in a family garage, Otho Behr Junior and his father, a chemist, started a company called Linseed Oil Products. F44 In 1979 that company began selling through a chain of hardware stores called The Home Depot, and it has been there ever since. F45
One more date, because it changed what goes into every can. On February twenty-seventh, 1978, the federal Consumer Product Safety Commission banned paint containing more than six hundredths of one percent lead from homes, schools, furniture and toys. F42 By 2009 that limit had been tightened to nine thousandths of one percent. F43
So the can has been sealed, ready-mixed and lead-free for decades. What changed is everything printed on the outside of it. And that is where the four promises live.
Paint and primer in one: true, and useless
The first promise is the one printed in the biggest letters: paint and primer in one.
This one surprised me, because it holds up. Consumer Reports, which buys paint off the shelf and tests it, says most of the paints it tests are now self-priming, and they work well. Their paint expert, Rico de Paz, puts it plainly: self-priming paints have improved to the point where you no longer need to prime. F23
The same article quotes a spokeswoman for Dow Chemical saying that contractors rarely use self-priming paints, because they worry about doing the job twice. F24
So why ignore it? Because when almost every can on the shelf says it, the words stop telling one can apart from another. A promise that every competitor makes is not a reason to pick this one.
And the manufacturers' own data sheets tell you where the promise ends. Behr's sheet for its top interior line says you still need more than one coat over uncoated or porous surfaces, over woods like cedar and redwood, and over heavy stains that may need spot priming first. F20 Read that list twice, because it is exactly the list of walls where people buy a paint and primer to skip the primer.
The one-coat guarantee and the colors it leaves out
The second promise is one coat, and on the best-known version of it, the fine print is on the same data sheet.
Behr sells its Marquee line with a guaranteed one-coat hide. The technical sheet says the guarantee excludes the brand's own Ultra Pure White, excludes every color outside its one-coat collection, and excludes any other color that has not been named as a one-coat color. F19
Think about what that means in the store. You pick a color from a fan deck of hundreds. The one-coat promise is on the can. Whether it applies to your color is a question you have to ask, and the base itself, untinted, is excluded by name.
The paint in the can does not change from color to color. The promise does. That is why the words one coat, on their own, are not a reason to pay more.
Five owners behind the names in the aisle
The third promise is the name itself. A name on a can feels like a company standing behind it. Here is who actually stands behind the names in an American paint aisle today.
Start with Sherwin-Williams. In June 2017 Sherwin-Williams finished buying Valspar, at a hundred and thirteen dollars a share, a deal it had valued at about eleven point three billion dollars. F1 F2 Today it makes paint under its own name and under Valspar, HGTV Home by Sherwin-Williams, Dutch Boy, Krylon, Minwax, Thompson's Water Seal and Cabot. F2
HGTV Home by Sherwin-Williams went on sale at Lowe's in 2015, under an exclusive deal announced the year before. F5 The paint sold under the name Sherwin-Williams itself is sold only in the company's own stores, more than four thousand one hundred of them. F2
Behr, the brand at The Home Depot, has belonged since 1999 to Masco, a company better known for Delta faucets. F11 F10 Masco also owns Kilz, the primer. F9
Benjamin Moore became part of Berkshire Hathaway on January first, 2001, for thirty-seven dollars and eighty-two cents a share, about a billion dollars in all. F13 F14
Glidden and Olympic belonged to PPG until December 2024, when PPG sold its entire American and Canadian house paint business to an investment firm, American Industrial Partners, for five hundred and fifty million dollars. F6 The firm renamed it The Pittsburgh Paints Company, and it now sells Glidden, Olympic, Liquid Nails and Flood at Home Depot, Lowe's, Walmart and Menards. F8
Last time I promised you three companies behind this aisle. The honest count is at least five owners across the big names, and one of them, Pittsburgh Paints, describes itself as among the top three producers in its market. F8 What the name on the can does not tell you is which of them made it, or what they put in it. Three of those five owners are not paint companies first: one sells Delta faucets, one is Berkshire Hathaway, and one is an investment firm. None of that is a scandal. It just means the name tells you who sells the paint, and nothing about what went into it.
What a lifetime warranty actually pays
The fourth promise is the one that sounds like it should settle everything: a lifetime warranty.
Take Behr's. It covers its Marquee, Premium Plus Ultra and Premium Plus lines, for as long as you live in your home, and only for the original buyer. If the paint fails, Behr will, at its option, give you an equivalent amount of new paint or refund what you paid for the paint. It excludes the labor and the cost of labor to apply it or to remove it. F22
Benjamin Moore's lifetime limited warranty reads almost the same. As long as you live in the house, with your original receipt, you get an equivalent or comparable product at no charge, and in capital letters: it does not include the cost of labor for application of paint. F21
Now do the arithmetic that the word lifetime hides. Say a bedroom takes two gallons at fifty dollars. [EX] If the paint fails, the warranty covers a hundred dollars of paint. It does not cover scraping off the failed coat, or the weekend, or the painter. [EX]
On any wall you pay someone to paint, the paint is the cheap part of the job. A lifetime warranty on the cheap part is still worth having, but it is not a reason to pay more per gallon. The reason to pay more has to be inside the can. And that is where the three numbers come in.
One practical thing before we leave the warranty. Both of these ask for the original sales receipt before they give you anything back. F21 F22 If you are going to rely on the word lifetime, the receipt has to last as long as the paint. Photograph it, and keep the photo with the house papers.
The free sheet nobody opens
Every major paint maker publishes a technical data sheet for each product. It is a one or two page document written for professionals, and it is free. You can find it on the manufacturer's site, usually from the product page, and the store can print it for you.
The quickest way in the aisle is your phone. Type the exact product name and the words technical data sheet. Not the color, not the sheen, the product line. The sheet you want has a table near the top with the physical properties, and that table is where all three numbers live.
I opened the current sheets for three premium interior paints: Sherwin-Williams Emerald, Benjamin Moore Aura, and Behr Marquee. F27 F28 F29 They come from three different companies, and every one of them has the same table near the top.
40%, 45%, 46%: what stays on the wall
The first number is volume solids. Paint is two things: the solids, which are the pigment and the binder that stay on your wall, and the liquid that carries them there and then evaporates. Sherwin-Williams says it in its own guide for contractors: top-quality paints have a greater ratio of solids to liquids. F32
On Sherwin-Williams Emerald satin, the volume solids are forty percent, plus or minus two. F27
On Behr Marquee eggshell, forty-five percent. F29
On Benjamin Moore Aura eggshell, forty-six percent. F28
This is the number that matters most. When you roll on a coat four thousandths of an inch thick, wet, what stays on the wall after it dries is the wet thickness times the volume solids. Sherwin-Williams' own sheet puts it at four mils wet and one point six mils dry. F27 Behr's says four mils wet and one point eight dry. F29 Benjamin Moore's recommends four to four point six wet for one point nine to two point one dry. F28
With the same size can on the same size wall, the difference is how much paint is left once the water is gone. And notice the other number on those sheets: all three claim about the same coverage, three hundred and fifty to four hundred square feet a gallon. F27 F28 F29 Coverage tells you how far the gallon goes. Volume solids tells you how much is left when it gets there.
One number never makes a ranking on its own, and I am not going to pretend it does. But when two cans cost the same, the one with more solids is giving you more of what you paid for.
The binder the front of the can won't name
The second number hides inside a word: the binder, sometimes called the resin or the vehicle. It is the glue that holds the pigment to the wall. Sherwin-Williams lists the three kinds that go into latex house paint: one hundred percent acrylic, styrene acrylic, or vinyl acrylic. And it says the type, quality and amount of binder affect everything from stain resistance to adhesion to cracking. F32
On the three sheets I opened, Behr Marquee says one hundred percent acrylic. F29 Benjamin Moore Aura says proprietary one hundred percent acrylic. F28 And Sherwin-Williams Emerald, the company's own premium line, says styrene acrylic. F27
I am not going to tell you one of those is always better. What I am telling you is that the front of the can will not say which one you are buying, and the data sheet will, in one line.
The only number the maker can't grade
The third number is the only one on the sheet that the manufacturer does not get to grade by itself. Since 1967 the Master Painters Institute has kept an approved products list. F34 It tests paints against its own performance standards, and an approved product carries an MPI number for the kind of job it passed. F34
Benjamin Moore Aura lists MPI 138. F28 Behr Marquee lists MPI 52 and 139. F29 The Emerald sheet marks MPI approval with a yes. F27
The Institute is careful to say that approval is for particular uses, not for every surface under every condition. F34 That is exactly why it is useful. It tells you what the paint was tested for, by somebody who did not sell it to you.
$67 a year or $28 a year
So here is the way to read a paint aisle. Ignore the four promises: paint and primer, one coat, the lifetime warranty, and the name. Then pull the data sheet and read three things: the volume solids, the binder, and the MPI number.
And if you are wondering whether any of this is worth the money, Behr answers it in one of its own documents. In the environmental declaration for its Premium Plus interior paint, Behr assumes a low quality interior paint lasts three years, a mid quality one seven, and a high quality one fifteen. F31
Sherwin-Williams does the same math for exterior paint in its contractor guide. A twenty dollar gallon that lasts six years costs sixty-seven dollars a year on a twenty gallon job. A thirty-five dollar gallon that lasts twenty-five years costs twenty-eight. F33 Those are the maker's own round numbers, not a lab test. But the logic holds for any wall you care about: the price per gallon is the wrong number. The price per year is the right one, and the data sheet is how you guess it before you pay.
Consumer Reports makes the same point about brands. When it tested gallons of paint in 2024, its expert warned that the same brand can have different formulas, and they can do very differently in testing. F35 In that same round of testing, Behr Marquee cost fifty-three dollars a gallon. F36 At that price, the data sheet is worth two minutes of reading. Read the sheet for the product, not the name on the sign.
What is in your garage?
If you have a can in the garage right now, look up its data sheet tonight and tell me in the comments what the volume solids are. I would like to see how far that number really runs across the brands people actually buy.
Next time, washing machines: six designs that cannot be repaired, and three that still can.
Subscribe if you want that one, and I will see you tomorrow.