The Color Digest · Compare
Settled, side by side
Tundra
Benjamin Moore · 2133-70
A white that keeps its cool
Le Cygne
Ressource · R238
The Paris apartment white
In real rooms
Every room, each colorThe difference
Read from the numbersTundra leans cool where Le Cygne reads warm. Both belong to the whites family.
How they read
In their own wordsTundra is the off-white for people who find most whites too creamy. Its LRV of 77 puts it in soft-white territory, but the base is a cool, faintly green-blue grey, so it reads clean and quiet rather than warm. On plaster mouldings and in rooms with a lot of daylight it looks like fresh air.
Le 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.