I laughed at this idea at first:
Real men don’t paint their basements in Butterscotch Tempest. They colour the walls with Beer Time.
CIL Paints has launched Canada’s first “paint colours for men” collection, Ultimate Man Caves, designed to get men more excited about painting projects. Or, judging by the chosen names, at least get the Canadian paint company some free publicity.
CIL has renamed 27 of its paint chip names including Fairytale Green (Mo Money), Monterey Cliffs (Wolfden) and Cloud Nine (Iced Vodka).
A newly launched brochure offers an array of decorating choices for every room, from the “man cave” — “Featuring new CIL paint colour names for men such as Midlife Crisis, Brute Force, and Deathstar, the walls of this bathroom have ‘masculine’ written all over them,” — to the home theatre room — “The ultimate chill colour combo for having the guys over for pizza and the game . . . or to watch Die Hard for the sixteenth time.”
[. . .]
‘‘Studies show that while a larger percentage of women tend to choose paint colours for their home, it’s often men who give the colours a final nod.”
The original idea behind the campaign was to “do something hilarious,” she says. CIL held a Facebook contest in August asking people for manlier monikers in English and French and more than 15,000 responded. CIL’s marketing team chose their favourites (Ms. Goldman’s favourites are Old Sweat Pants and Pimpin’ the Trans-Am) to be featured in-store along with their 1,200 existing colours.
I thought it was silly until I remembered the last time Elizabeth and I painted a room in our house. She’d selected some paint colours that she thought would work well, and I immediately renamed them as “Luftwaffe Canteen” and “Feldgrau”. Not that I didn’t like them, but that the “official” names didn’t describe them accurately to me. Maybe CIL is on to something after all.
