The Color Digest · Compare
Settled, side by side
Le Cygne
Ressource · R238
The Paris apartment white
Aegean Olive
Benjamin Moore · 1491
Olive with the volume turned all the way down
In real rooms
Every room, each colorThe difference
Read from the numbersBoth read warm. Le Cygne is a whites, Aegean Olive a greens.
How they read
In their own wordsLe Cygne — the swan — is a warm, matte ivory from the French house Ressource. It has the chalky, light-absorbing quality of old lime plaster, which is why it looks so at home on Haussmann panelling and ceiling roses: it softens the light rather than bouncing it around. Cream is present, yellow is not.
Aegean Olive is a deep, greyed olive that sits closer to bronze and khaki than to anything leafy. With an LRV just under 12 it behaves like a dark neutral: it wraps a room, dissolves corners and makes cane, rattan and aged brass look expensive. It is the green you choose when you do not want the room to read as green.