Why Is a White Paint Named Climate Change?

Last year, Emily Mediate found herself in a Virginia Home Depot, studying an array of off-white paint chips all with names like Frost and Bakery Box, Harmonious and Vintage Linen. She was planning to paint her deck and picked up a calm, generic beige. Then she noticed its name: Climate Change. “It threw me off,” she said. Mediate is an executive at a nonprofit with an environmental push; she sees climate change as a catastrophe, not a décor project. “It’s like naming a color after a disease,” she said. “I keep wondering, Who did this, and what were they thinking?”

She wasn’t the first. A science journalist had posted on X about the color the year before, asking Behr, the paint company, if it chose it “because the behr paint logo is a bear… is this about polar bears darkening their coats because of declining sea ice??” In 2019, an artist in Hawaii shared the odd name on Reddit’s “CrappyDesign” forum. (“It’s that nice ‘stranded polar bear’ color.”) But the company never responded to any of those posts publicly, and neither Behr nor its sales partner, Home Depot, ever responded to a request from Curbed about the name, or a request for a broader interview about its naming processes in general.

A screengrab from Behr’s website shows how the paint is marketed with no association to an environmental cause.
Photo: Retailer

This says a lot, if only because the company’s color-namer-in-chief, Erika Woelfel, has given chatty interviews to the Vancouver Sun, showed up on Good Morning America, and spoken about paint naming to Apartment Therapy, saying that she tries to “anticipate how a suggested name could be interpreted by a potential Home Depot shopper.” Mostly, Behr seems to do that very well, said Panchita Maldonado, a color consultant who learned the business at the luxe paint brand Farrow & Ball and who uses Behr regularly. “Typically, they put a lot of thought into the name,” said Maldonado, citing Diva Glam (pink) and 100 MPH (red). “So this is really quite surprising.” Diana Palchik, a trademark attorney who focuses on the colors of cosmetics and has heard every odd name under the sun, laughed when she heard the name. “Oh gosh,” said Natalie Ebel, who runs the paint brand Backdrop. “Like, actually just ‘Climate Change’?”

The obvious theory is that the name is deliberate: the result of a green initiative to perhaps give some portion of sales to a charity. But no Behr publicity around its environmental tweaks to its cans or its paint mentions specific color names at all. So is the color itself environmentally friendly, like a reflective paint developed by researchers that can cool buildings? But no, Climate Change is sold in the same formulas as other Behr paints, including matte, semi-gloss, and eggshell.

Behr’s paint is sold through the website of its partner, Home Depot, which offers Climate Change in its typical formulas, including this pro line.
Photo: Retailer

So maybe the name is just part of a trend in paint naming — where names have gotten weirder as brands have realized they can get free marketing when a TikTokker sharing a DIY project remembers what they painted their shelf. “Even if someone isn’t tagging the company, they’re sharing the funny name,” said Ebel, who built her business around the theory that paint should be sold like lipstick: with a curated palette of colors that won’t overwhelm buyers, which are sold under names that evoke the mood they might be going for. “People buy feelings,” she said. The 50 colors she sells include Disco Nap (acid yellow), Silver Lake Dad (gray green), and Ryokan Guesthouse (a cool beige). Those names make a certain sense when they’re unpacked, even Silver Lake Dad — which is silvery, lake-y, and as soft as a dad who “listens to NPR and is not speeding on the way to school drop-off,” said Ebel, who named the color after her husband. 

But anyone who saw a social-media post that mentioned Silver Lake Dad would have an easy time finding that color for sale on Backdrop’s site. (It dominates the entire first page of Google results.) Not so for Climate Change. So the choice doesn’t feel like an SEO strategy. But it also doesn’t look right for the name, at least to Maldonado. “That color would never lead me to think of Climate Change, and the name Climate Change would never lead me to think about that color,” said Maldonado, the color consultant. Maldonado said she would have thought the name was deliberate if the company had gone with a violent, muddy-fire tone. “Climate change, for me, is synonymous with global warming,” she said. “I immediately went into a burnt amber, like a color called Satchel by Benjamin Moore.”

So could Behr — a company that sells 4,000 colors — have just gotten lazy about one name? There are more white paints on the market than any other color, making an original name harder to reach for. A Sherwin-Williams exec told the Washington Post that she was once up against a deadline and named 50 colors in a single night, watching her standards slip away. “It’s like, Ballerina Slipper, ugh, fine, I’m doing it,” she said. But only a few of the names she brainstormed made it into production because of the next step in the process: a corporate culling.

“I think it’s a harder process than people realize,” said Benjamin Moore’s Andrea Magno, whose team oversees 3,500 colors. “We have a number of stage gates we have to put our names through to make sure there aren’t any issues; to make sure there aren’t any things that could be problematic.” Her team of six, with various backgrounds from design to studio art to art history to marketing, will throw out names in person or plug them into a spreadsheet, with the goal of coming up with four workable names for every color. Those four possibilities then get screened by a public-relations team, who review each name “to make sure it’s not going to be off-putting,” she said. And the names also face a legal review, to ensure that Benjamin Moore doesn’t already sell a color by that or a similar name, and that other brands don’t either.

Lawyers who do those reviews scour databases, shopping sites, and even social media, says Palchik, the longtime trademark attorney and consultant who has reviewed hundreds of names for beauty and cosmetics companies, her focus. When she finds repeats, she might suggest synonyms. And though she pushes clients toward “unique” names, she says that is sometimes at odds with marketing teams, who are thinking about the color names that shoppers use to search (light green, whitish green) or the unconventional paint names they might have been trying to buy instead. Natalie Ebel thinks companies have been copying her clever names, like her sage-green Weekend Upstate. (Benjamin Moore also sells Weekend Getaway, and Behr has Catskill Brown.) Behr’s color czar, Erika Woelfel, once cited Intellectual (charcoal gray) as one of the company’s more popular colors, and maybe Sherwin-Williams noticed: It sells Intellectual Gray.

While Palchik was explaining how paint companies might be aware of other popular paint names, and lawyers might also sometimes suggest looking up other words that call up the same concepts, I was thinking of Andrea Magno, the Benjamin Moore executive who had explained the company’s careful naming process with examples of some of its most popular names: Vintage Vogue, Balboa Mist, and Glacier White.

Climate Change isn’t a synonym for a glacier, but the two ideas are associated — a connection that Emily Mediate, the nonprofit executive shopping for paint for her deck, had noticed right away. What had partly angered her about the color name was that it seemed to show that Behr thought of climate change as being associated with far-off things like, in her words, “melting icebergs, polar bears, and the Arctic.”

Side by side, Benjamin Moore’s Glacier White and Behr’s Climate Change look almost identical: brackish whites, tasteful beiges, undergirded with a dollop of green. The description on Behr’s website suddenly seemed like a major clue, calling Climate Change “an icy green-gray.” Icy. Could Behr’s team have named their new color after Benjamin Moore’s popular Glacier White deliberately? Or had they landed on the same name and, realizing that it was a repeat, Googled around for what they thought evoked a similar concept — one that, unlike the synonyms “Iceberg” or “Floe,” they could legally protect?

This seems to be, if not exactly right, not exactly wrong, either. In response to a request for a fact-check on this piece, a Behr spokesman finally wrote me back to let me know that the “earthy” color was named for its “connection to the natural world.”