What Is The Best Paint Sheen To Use: Flat, Satin, or Semigloss?

It's a little bit difficult to talk about paint sheen when there's all these other sheen in between out there or there's sheen called matte that are basically a flat just slightly above and even within Sherwood Williams you got more than just your flat satin semi- glosses and glosses you have low sheen you got matte sheen and then just a bunch of other crap just out there just to confuse us but just to keep it simple we'll talk about flat satin semig glosses and high glosses and when I'm actually painting I'll start off with just talking about ceilings and what I like and why I like to paint ceilings with flat paints. I typically always use flat paints. It's pretty rare that I use anything on a ceiling other than a flat paint. So, when painting ceilings, there's two methods of painting them. We either roll them or spray them. And I've come to over the years to like a product from Sher Williams called Eminence. And and the reason why I like it is we can spray it or roll it. And it comes in a flat sheen. And I like a flat sheen because the the most important reason why I like it is it doesn't show light glare. I don't like to have light glare on my ceilings at all. And that's when you turn your lights on, the ceiling will get this bright glare on it. You really can't tell what the true color is because all you see is light glare. So I want my ceilings to be flat so I can see the true color. And then also a flat definitely helps hide imperfections. And then a flat paint is less likely to flash or so show lap marks if you're using a good quality paint when you're spraying it. And if you're spraying a satin on a ceiling, satin on a ceiling, it's really difficult not to get lap marks or what we call flashing. And if you're using a good quality flat paint, you're less likely to get that. And over the years of painting, we've used the product and we've used a lot of different products, but we've used Eminence. And that is by far the best ceiling paint to actually spray when it comes to not getting lap marks on your ceilings. And that's where you're actually spraying. You'll see these lines and stripes on the ceilings. And Eminence has a tendency to not do that. And especially if you know how to spray and spray properly. I do got some videos that will teach you how to spray a ceiling properly. and you can check those videos out when you're done watching this video. But now, after talking about some uh ceiling sheen, we'll get on to talking about some wall sheen. So, now we're going to talk a little bit about wall paints and wall sheen. And once again, you have all these different sheen out there from flats, satins, semi- glosses, and glosses and everything in between. I got to say, a gloss, it's very rare that I ever use a gloss on anything ever. It's I haven't used a gloss paint probably in um in at least 10 years. I I use semig gloss on on trim, but I don't use gloss on the trim. So, we'll get to the walls. You could paint flats on your walls. And a flat paint typically is going to show true colors. So, if you got some nice accent colors that you're putting on your walls, some accent paints, um the light will actually show glare on your walls. and when you turn on your lights and it doesn't show the true color cuz you'll get that glare on the walls. So, if you want your walls to really show true color and look really really good, a flat paint would be uh a really good option. But then one of the drawbacks to flat paints is they don't clean very well and then they don't touch up very well. And those are two uh drawbacks that I don't like. So, I would never use a flat paint on with any color in my house. And I typically try to always talk customers out of flat paints. There is a technology out there with some paints on the market. Sure, Williams has a flat paint that you could actually uh draw a Sharpie marker on it and it'll actually wipe off, which is pretty amazing for a flat paint. And they're pretty scrubable and cleanable, but still um from my experience, they don't touch up very well. And they show oils from your skin uh quite a bit. So, if you if you're doing a hallway and somebody touches the hallway, what I've noticed is the oils from your skin on those flat paints will show up because it'll make the flat shinier. And so, then you got to go try to clean it or touch it up and it just becomes a big problem, big nightmare. So, I've steered away from ever using flat paints. Would never use them in my house. I like satin paints on the walls and satin touches up well. If you touch the walls or if your arm or any type of skin oils gets on the walls, you can't see it because it's a satin sheen. And satins roll out very well, cover very well, they have less light glare than your semi- glosses and glosses. And then they they are pretty scrubable and cleanable with latex latex paint technologies. it is. As you go up in sheen, do you go up to a semi- gloss and to a gloss? There is a lot more uh say acrylic in the paint that's going to make it more durable and more washable then. But then you got that trade-off of the walls being extremely shiny, which is a look that I just don't like and most customers don't like. So on my walls, I typically stick with a satin paint. So, now we'll talk about trim paint on the inside of a house. And I would say 99% of the time when we're spraying trim packages uh or even furniture or entertainment centers and such, we always use a semi- gloss paint. You can use uh high gloss paints or glosses, but they one of the drawbacks to them is they are more difficult to work with for professional painters and do-it-yourselfers. They run a lot easier, and I just don't like that super shiny plasticky look. I just think the um the semig gloss looks a lot better. And it is a little bit more durable and more washable, so it's better than a satin. And I do like my trim, my entertainment centers, my furniture, I like them just to have uh a little bit higher sheen than the walls. So it kind of sets off sets off the trim from the walls. So we're always using a semi- gloss trim paint. And I use a product, one of the products I is probably my favorite products to use because it's for a professional standpoint. It sprays really well. The sheen looks really, really nice. It hangs very well, so it doesn't run very easy. And that's a product from Sher Winds called Solo. And that's the product we use the most often. And it has a very good adhesion. So it sticks to surfaces very well. Other surfaces like previously painted semi- gloss surfaces. It bonds extremely well even if you didn't use a primer. We typically always del gloss our surfaces. But it's a really good product. I do get questions from uh customers occasionally or from some of my subscribers out there. What about kitchens and bathrooms? And bathrooms, if nowadays all the homes we're dealing with typically have, they're very well ventilated. And there's not a lot of moisture in the bathrooms. But if you do have customers that take long long showers, then there's going to be a lot of humidity in the bathroom. And the higher the sheen, the more likely it's going to repel water and it's going to last a lot longer and it's not going to get milky. Where if on the walls you get a lot of water on the walls, it starts to run. Lower sheen paints will what we call milk and you'll see those runs and it starts to look pretty unsightly or like water spots. And so you could jump up into a semi- gloss. It's very very rare because the paints and then technology in latex paints nowadays, even in your satin paints, they're very resistant to water and they're very durable. So all the bathrooms I paint, even my bathroom itself, they're painted with satin paints. But occasionally we'll run into a very old home that has no ventilation, had a mildew problem, and then we'll just bump that up into a semi- gloss paint and we'll add some milicide additive to it if there was any type of mildew problem. So that's for uh bathrooms, kitchens, kitchens are always typically well ventilated and don't need to be uh don't need to be painted with a semi- gloss paint. I just the colors people are choosing these days, the the colors just being extremely shiny. I just I I just personally don't like the look of a semi- gloss paint really anywhere. So, I steer away from it. So, hopefully that helps you uh when it comes to choosing what sheen you need to paint in your house. Hopefully, it's answered some of my questions from some from some of my subscribers about sheen, where to use them, what they're good for, and why use a flat versus a sat.