Benjamin Moore Hale NavyvsBenjamin Moore Newburyport Blue

A dark blue with a heavy pour of charcoal in it — that is the whole color in one sentence. Most navies on the fan deck are built on a clean blue pigment that stays obviously blue no matter where you put it. Hale Navy is knocked back with gray, so the blue only steps forward when light lands on it directly. Stand a Hale Navy sample next to a true black like Onyx 2133-10 and the blue is unmistakable. Stand it alone on a wall across the room and most people will call it charcoal. Both reactions are correct, and which one you get depends almost entirely on where the color sits relative to your windows and lamps.

At LRV 8 it hands back only a few percent of the light that hits it. Practically, that means the wall contributes nothing to the brightness of the room — every bit of light you have has to come from the windows and the fixtures, and the corners farthest from both will go flat and dark. This is also why paper samples lie: a two-inch chip is floated in a sea of white paper that bounces light back into it, so it looks like a rich blue in your hand and like a shadow once it covers a wall. Paint a large sample board, lean it where the actual surface will be, and look at it at 9 a.m., 4 p.m., and after dinner.

A deep navy with a warm, faintly green undercurrent — and that undercurrent is what separates it from its more famous stablemates. Benjamin Moore built Newburyport Blue as part of its Historical Collection, named for the old shipbuilding port on the Massachusetts North Shore, and side-by-side color analysis backs up what a lot of buyers notice on the wall: it leans a touch warmer and greener than Hale Navy (HC-154), which sits closer to the neutral center of the wheel and reads distinctly greyer. Against Sherwin-Williams Naval (SW 6244), the deepest and most saturated of the three, Newburyport is the softer, lighter one. It occupies the middle — not as inky as Naval, more clearly blue than Hale Navy.

At LRV 7 this is genuine near-black paint, essentially tied with Hale Navy (6) and Wrought Iron (6) for depth. The practical difference shows up in dim conditions: independent color comparisons and real kitchen-island photos consistently show Newburyport holding a visible blue further into shade and evening light before it starts reading as plain dark charcoal, while Hale Navy grays out sooner. Neither color escapes the physics of a chip this dark — both go essentially black with no direct light at all — but Newburyport gives up its color more slowly.