Clare Paint: The Brand Hub (2026)

Disclosure: Affiliate links. We earn a commission if you buy through them, at no extra cost to you. Picks are based on independent testing and what colors actually do in real rooms.

The 30-second take

Clare is the direct-to-consumer paint brand most likely to be the right answer for a first-time buyer who walks into the Lowe’s paint aisle and freezes in front of the chip wall. Seventy colors, named like a designer names them (Whipped, Goldilocks, Beach Day, Penthouse), shipped to your door in 1-3 days. The formula is zero-VOC, GreenGuard Gold, and good enough for an apartment wall. The price is roughly $53 a gallon: mid-premium, well above contractor-grade and well below Aura.

You’re paying for the curation and the convenience. If you know exactly what color you want and you live near a Sherwin or Benjamin Moore store, Clare is the slower, narrower option. If you don’t, and the chip wall is making you anxious, Clare’s seventy-color edit is the most useful thing on the internet.

What Clare actually is

Founded in Brooklyn in 2018 by Nicole Gibbons, a former architect and stylist who was tired of watching homeowners freeze at the paint chip wall. The pitch from the start was a curated palette and a clean ordering experience: pick a color, pick a sheen, pick a quantity, and a can shows up at your door in two or three days. No store visit. No tinting wait. No 1,500-color decision fatigue.

The formula is one paint across the line, available in three sheens. Zero VOC. GreenGuard Gold certified. Master Painter Institute Green Performance Standard. Those certifications are real and the spec sheet backs them up. Performance sits in the same tier as Behr Marquee or Benjamin Moore Regal Select: solid washability, decent scrub durability, honest hide on two coats over a similar primed base. Not Aura. Not Emerald. Not pretending to be either.

The colors are named the way a designer names colors. Whipped reads as the cream from the inside of a hazelnut, not the supermarket whipped topping. Goldilocks is a pale buttery neutral that goes warm in afternoon light and quietly cool at breakfast. Penthouse is the moody charcoal you put in a small bathroom to make it feel intentional rather than dim. Beach Day is the soft warm-white that doesn’t read pink at 4pm or grey at 7am.

That naming is part of what you’re buying.

The peel-and-stick swatches

This is the feature that earns Clare its reputation.

A traditional paint chip is a printed card held against a wall in store light. A Clare swatch is 9 inches by 14 inches, peel-and-stick, ships in two or three days, and goes directly on your wall. You see the color in your morning light, your afternoon light, your overhead-LED-with-the-floor-lamps-on light. The color you see at 8pm is the color you’ll live with. A chip cannot tell you that.

Five dollars a swatch, free with a paint order. Order three or four for a room. Live with them for a week. Watch what each does at 7am, at noon, at 6pm. The one that holds up across all three is the one to buy. The Behr or SW alternative — drive to the store, get a $5 sample pot, paint a 12-inch square on a piece of cardboard, hold it against the wall — works. The peel-and-stick is faster, cleaner, and reads more honestly because the color is on the actual wall.

The lines, briefly

Clare is one paint formula across the entire range. What changes is sheen.

Eggshell

The most-ordered finish, and the right default for living rooms, bedrooms, and dining rooms. Soft low-sheen finish, gentle drape, hides minor wall texture without going full matte. The wall doesn’t read like a screen.

Semi-Gloss

For trim, doors, and any high-touch surface. Higher sheen, harder cured film, more washable. Not as hard at thirty days as Benjamin Moore Advance or Sherwin Emerald Urethane, but fine for trim in a finished room.

Flat

Ceiling paint, mostly. A handful of designers will spec it for walls in a formal room where the brief is no reflection at all. Use it on a ceiling and it disappears, which is what you want.

That’s the whole sheen menu. No matte (Clare’s eggshell sits where most brands’ matte sits). No high-gloss. No specialty enamels. No waterborne alkyd. No exterior. No masonry. Walls, trim, and ceilings inside an apartment or house. That’s the brief.

Where Clare wins

The first-time buyer. Standing at the Lowe’s chip wall with no idea where to start is the worst part of choosing paint. Clare’s seventy-color edit is the curated answer. Whipped, Goldilocks, Beach Day, Pavilion, Penthouse. Read the names, look at the swatches, pick three. The decision goes from impossible to easy in twenty minutes.

The renter on a third-floor walk-up. Lugging three gallons of Behr Marquee up a Brooklyn brownstone stoop in July is its own kind of project. Clare ships to your door. The five-dollar shipping fee is the cheapest part of the job.

The designer running multiple client projects. A clean ordering system, predictable color reproduction across batches, a curated palette that’s easy to spec by name. Order Whipped for the Tribeca apartment, order Beach Day for the Cobble Hill brownstone, the cans show up at the right addresses on the right days.

The smaller job where convenience pays back. One bedroom, one accent wall, one powder room. Two gallons or fewer. The convenience premium of $10-15 a gallon over Behr Marquee at Home Depot is small money when the project is small. Where it stops penciling is when the project is whole-house.

Where Clare loses

Whole-house repaints. Twelve gallons at $53 against twelve gallons of Behr Marquee at $50 (or Sherwin Cashmere at $45 on a sale weekend) and the convenience math reverses. You’ll burn the savings into a single Saturday driving to and from Home Depot, sure. But on a 12-gallon job that gap is real money. For whole-house, drive to a store.

The custom color buyer. Clare doesn’t match competitor colors. If you fell in love with BM Revere Pewter or SW Agreeable Gray and you want exactly that color, Clare can’t help. Go to a BM dealer or a SW store. They’ll match free, in any base, in any sheen.

Specialty needs. No exterior. No masonry. No waterborne alkyd for cabinets. No deep-bond primer for chalky alkyd substrate. Walls and ceilings only. For trim that has to survive small-child use or a kitchen cabinet refresh that needs to actually cure hard, the Benjamin Moore Advance or Sherwin Emerald Urethane is the right call.

Deep saturated color depth. The DTC archive is curated, which means it’s narrow. You won’t find a true oxblood, a deep bottle green, a saturated cobalt, or a heritage Pantone match in Clare’s seventy. The pigment package is honest for the price tier, but the depth-on-the-wall on saturated colors that Aura and F&B deliver isn’t what Clare is selling. If saturation is the brief, Clare is the wrong start.

Where Kompozit fits

Honest paragraph, since Kompozit is our priority partner.

Kompozit doesn’t compete in the DTC-curated tier. The Kompozit US range is contractor-grade interior and exterior, sold through dealers, mixed in any color from the Kompozit deck or color-matched at the dealer counter. Different channel, different buyer, different problem to solve.

For a Clare buyer who loves a particular Clare color but wants a contractor-grade price and a wider sheen menu, the path is to bring a Clare peel-and-stick swatch to a Kompozit dealer and have the color matched into a Kompozit base. The match won’t be optically identical (different pigment systems, different binders, different drape on the wall), but for a soft neutral like Whipped or Goldilocks the color reads close. Use the Clare swatch as the inspiration, the Kompozit base as the spec.

For everyone else, this isn’t a head-to-head. Kompozit and Clare are answers to different questions.

Buying Clare at the right price

There isn’t a sale calendar like Sherwin runs or Lowe’s runs on Valspar. Clare prices are stable: roughly $53 a gallon for the wall paint, free shipping over a threshold, peel-and-stick swatches at five dollars or free with the paint order. Occasional 10-15% off promotions around Memorial Day and Black Friday, nothing dramatic.

The honest move is to use Clare for the rooms it fits (a single room, a renter’s apartment, a first-time DIY) and use Sherwin or Behr for the rooms it doesn’t (whole-house, exterior, trim that takes abuse). The peel-and-stick swatches are the feature to actually order regardless of what brand you end up buying. Five dollars to see a color on the actual wall in the actual light is the cheapest decision you can make on a paint project.

Related

• Farrow & Ball: the brand hub: the premium color-led DTC alternative
• Sherwin-Williams: the brand hub: when the chip wall is the right answer
• Alternatives to Benjamin Moore: where Clare fits in the field
• Best bathroom paint: why Clare’s eggshell sometimes isn’t the right call
• LRV explained: why a Clare swatch reads differently in your room than on the website