If you’re thinking about ordering Clare paint for an upcoming project, read this review. I’m sharing my honest thoughts about my experience, including likes and dislikes about Clare paint.
When Matt and I purchased our NYC studio in December, I realized that the way the sun hit the apartment made the white walls seem blue. Although it was pretty, I wanted a warmer feel to our small space along with some accent walls to jazz things up.
I didn’t love the ideas of various paint sample jars scattered in our 500 square foot apartment, and after seeing some interesting sticker swatches on Instagram, I found that the company that made these was Clare.
We hired a painter to paint our apartment using Clare paint. Although Clare gifted me product, the review below contains my own opinions about things I liked and didn’t like about the experience.
- What is Clare paint?
- Things I liked about using Clare
- What I didn’t like
- Final review thoughts – is Clare paint worth it?
Clare Paint Review
What is Clare Paint?
Clare paint is an online company that’s “on a mission to make paint shopping easy and inspiring.”
The idea of Clare paint is to take the hassle out of shopping for paint by providing a streamlined curation of interior designer-approved colors that you can order and get delivered right to your door.
Clare paint is Zero VOC, meaning the paint is free of toxic carbon-based solvents. According to the Clare paint website, the pain is also Greenguard Gold Certified. That means fewer pollutants and healthier indoor air quality.
What I Liked About Using Clare
Online and Easy to Use Website
Let me start this Clare paint review by sharing what I liked about the experience.
The entire Clare process is done online through an easy-to-use website.
If you’ve ever been to the paint section of the hardware store, then you know picking paint colors can be overwhelming.
Therefore, I really appreciate that Clare offers a highly curated selection of beautiful, everyday colors. If you’re looking to paint a room a crazy neon, you won’t find that on Clare’s site. So for that, I do recommend an in-person visit to your local paint store. But, they have a wide enough variety of colors that most people can probably find something they like.
My favorite part about selecting the colors for our apartment was utilizing the Clare Color Genius online quiz. It asks design-driven questions like the size of the room to be painted, which direction the sun comes in, and words to describe your aesthetic. After you finish the quiz, you’re given top color recommendations based on your answers.
Swatch Stickers Made Sampling Easy
Once I narrowed down a few color options, I ordered my swatches. I think Clare’s swatch stickers are genius. I wish all paint brands did this.
It’s a pain to swatch paint throughout your room or home to test how the paint looks in different light. We go back and forth between LA and NYC, so I knew this project would take some time to complete. I didn’t want blobs of paint all over our walls for an extended period, so these swatch stickers were really handy.
They’re decent size swatch samples that stayed sticky during their tour around my walls. I was able to ponder over my various gray swatches for a few days on one wall, them move the stickers to another wall easily.
Ordering and Shipping was Simple
I ultimately ended on these three colors for our apartment:
- Whipped – a warm white that, in our apartment, skews more neutral
- Wing It – a very pale pink for the alcove space behind our bed (and subtle enough for co-ed living)
- On Point – a smooth and clean light gray
The website has a dimension calculator on each page. We found it to be relatively accurate, although I did pad it a little to ensure we had enough paint.
My order shipped quickly, without any spills. Our box came with paint keys to open the cans and wood mixing sticks; both small necessities you could easily forget at the store.
If needed, you can choose to purchase brushes and trays at checkout. Clare really did think about the entire painting experience from start to finish.
Good Paint Quality
I’m obviously not a professional painter, but the paint went on evenly and smoothly.
I like that the paint contains zero VOCs so that you don’t have to worry about inhaling any bad chemicals.
However, there were a few things I wasn’t so thrilled with, which I’m sharing next in my Clare paint review.
What I Didn’t Like
Wrong Colors and Mislabeling
It’s very apparent that once the gray paint went up, we were sent the wrong color, despite being labeled as the one we wanted and ordered.
I don’t totally hate the color we got, but it’s not what I ordered. As a stroke of luck on my end, I changed which wall I wanted gray the day before our painter arrived to a much smaller wall.
As of right now we are keeping the darker gray wall as is. But, if this gray went up on the wall we originally planned for, it would have really made our apartment entirely too dark.
In full disclosure I did not contact Clare to fix this because we were dealing with a with a tight timeline with zero time to wait for new paint. So, I can’t speak to the company’s customer service, but I’m sure they would have fixed the issue.
If you’re doing a DIY project, this is mostly just an annoying setback, but if you have hired contractors this could really be an issue. This could also be a major hassle if you were sent the wrong cans for a full room and had to wait for the right color to arrive.
In addition to being sent the wrong gray, one of the white wall paint cans was labeled as trim paint and vice versa.
Luckily, our painter noticed this mix-up. However, if it were Matt and I painting on our own, we wouldn’t have realized this at all until the paint dried.
Trim paint is made to be more durable for baseboards and window frames, so there is an actual difference in the formula and finish.
Had our painter not caught this, we would have ended up with partially sheen walls and/or a delay in our project.
There Are No Physical Stores
Obviously, a major benefit to using Clare is that the whole process is online. But, if you run into any of the paint and color issues we did, there is no physical store you could run to for a quick fix. Similarly, if you end up needing more paint, you’ll have to wait for your order to finish the project.
Final Clare Paint Review Thoughts – Is it Worth It?
I genuinely really loved the experience right up until the paint mix ups. The Clare website is user-friendly; the quiz makes finding a color much less overwhelming than going into a store; the swatches made it easy to sample; and the paint seems to be high quality.
At $59/gallon, this price seemed to be in line with other premium interior paint lines from Benjamin Moore and Sherwin Williams.
Luckily our issues were small. I can live with a dark gray wall instead of a lighter one. Thankfully, our painter caught the mislabeled trim paint can.
However, these could really be deal-breakers and major pain points for many people. Consider that if there’s an issue, you can’t just go to the store to swap out your paint. If you do use Clare paint, be sure you triple check the colors and labels as soon as the cans come in and before your start your project.
