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 really interesting) 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, and its found in paint. It is what gives paint it’s hiding characteristics.
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2. Human Beings began painting 40,000 years ago, paintings in Indonesian caves were discovered by Archeologists and were carbon dated to that time period.
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3. More than 1.57 billion gallons of paint are sold each year in the United States alone.
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4. It takes 570 gallons of paint to coat the exterior of the White House in Washington DC.
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5. The use of paint has been linked all the way back 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 the discovery that you can mix two different paint colors 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 pigment.
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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. Throughout history a red front door has symbolized 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 made of lime mixed with milk and sometimes natural pigments. King Tut’s tomb was painted with milk paint! Even the White House was originally painted with a lime-based whitewash.
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11. There tend to be more shades of green than any other in commercially available paint colors because the human eye can distinguish more variations of green than of any other color.