It’s a sad reality that sometimes the color you want and have come to adore, whether it be lipstick shade, upholstery fabric, or paint color, gets discontinued.
You search high and low, but what you want is gone or destined for sale at a high markup on eBay because they know loyalists will pay.
Well, one nail artist says that at least when it comes to nail colors, she can recreate nearly any color you have in mind. To demonstrate the skill it requires, now she’s showing how a man who matches shades of car paint does it. He’s being heralded as a master of the trade.
An Epic Color Match
In a video with more than 2.8 million views, nail artist Dianna (@queendianna27) showed exactly how good she thinks her skills are.
“When a client says I want these nails but you probably don't have this color, no one does....” the text overlay on the video reads.
In the video, a woman hands an older gentleman a metallic pink paint sample. He studies the swatch before grabbing a clear plastic cup and pouring in several different paints, carefully controlling the amount of each color as he goes—but without pre-mixing and adding any additional paint.
When he mixes them together, the color is a dead ringer for the pink swatch, down to the metallic sheen. It appears that he nailed it on his first attempt. The video does not show him going back to adjust the formula, add another color, or start over.
Some people were confused by her video, as it appears to show Dianna herself asking the man to create a color. That does not appear to be the case. One tell is that the person who hands him the swatch has bare nails, while Dianna consistently has stylishly painted long nails in her videos.
Rather, Dianna seems to be pointing to the man’s skill to underscore the art of matching paint.
“Mixing colors has been my thing for years!!” Dianna wrote. “I dare you to come at me with a color I can't replicate.”
Gallery: Hand-Painted Mercedes-Benz G-Class By Alec Monopoly From Mansory
How Does Professional Color Matching Work?
Color matching is about recreating the fine details that make a color distinct, like its hue, saturation, and finish. Color itself comes down to wavelengths of light. As HowStuffWorks explains, visible light is one section of the larger electromagnetic spectrum, alongside X-rays, ultraviolet, infrared, microwaves, and radio waves.
The visible portion is commonly described as ROYGBIV: red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo and violet. In terms of light, black is the absence of visible light, while white combines the visible colors. Paint pigments work differently because they absorb some wavelengths and reflect others.
That reflected light is what a color-matching machine, called a spectrophotometer, reads. The spectrophotometer shines light onto a sample and measures the wavelengths that are reflected, converting them into data a computer can use to calculate a paint formula.
Sherwin-Williams describes a four-step process: they scan the sample, compare the reading against more than 50,000 stored formulas, measure and mix the selected tints, and then apply and cure the coating so it can be compared with the original.
But even professional color matching isn’t perfect. A spectrophotometer is usually about 90% accurate.
Color-Matching Skill Enraptures Audience
There are dozens of videos on TikTok and Instagram showing the man’s wild color-matching abilities. Some reposts identify him as a “color master” from Xianyang, China, while others credit the username @qingshan815 on Douyin.
Douyin is ByteDance's TikTok-style app for China. While people often describe it as China's TikTok, the New York Times explains that the two platforms are separate. Each platform’s users and content are separate.
People in the comment section were taken aback by how well the man was able to recreate the exact shade by eye, apparently without the benefit of a spectrophotometer or any other device.
“That man IS color theory,” a top comment read.
“The fact he got the ratio correct without even mixing it one time first, is absolutely insane,” a person said.
“That’s one hell of a mixologist right there,” another wrote.
Motor1 reached out to Dianna via email and Instagram direct message. We'll be sure to update this if she responds.
