11 Things You Didn’t Know About Paint

03 Aug 11 Things You Didn’t Know About Paint

At Neighborhood Painting, we have fun with our craft. When you were a kid, painting was fun, right? Well, some of us never grow up at heart. With that said, here’s a light-hearted (and exciting) list of 11 things you didn’t know about paint. Let’s get started:

1. Titanium Dioxide is the most expensive inorganic pigment in the world, found in paint. It is what gives paint its hiding characteristics.
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2. Human Beings began painting 40,000 years ago; archeologists discovered paintings in Indonesian caves that were carbon-dated to that period.
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3. More than 1.57 billion gallons of paint are sold annually in the United States alone.
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4. The exterior of the White House in Washington, D.C., requires 570 gallons of paint.
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5. The use of paint has been linked to the first century. The first place on record to use it is in China. Archeologists have also unearthed evidence of paint in ancient palaces built around this same timeframe. They figure ancient craftsmen applied ground pigments such as ochre to wet plastered walls to “paint” those interior surfaces!
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6. The Greek philosopher Plato is credited with discovering that two different paint colors can be mixed together to produce a third color.
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7. The color purple became associated with royalty because, at one time, only aristocrats could afford the expensive pigment. During Roman times, it took 4 million crushed mollusk shells to create one pound of purple dye.
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8. The first painters’ union was formed in London in 1502 and was called the Worshipful Company of Painters-Stainers.
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9. a red front door symbolizes many things, from a safe place for travelers to stop for the night to having a fully paid mortgage.
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10. The oldest house paint was lime mixed with milk and sometimes natural pigments. King Tut’s tomb was painted with milk paint, and even the White House was originally painted with a lime-based whitewash.
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11. Commercially available paint colors tend to contain more shades of green than any other color because the human eye can distinguish more variations of green than of any other color.