St. George, South Carolina Sunday, October 25, 2026 Complimentary

County Line Confidential

Dispatches from Dorchester County, South Carolina. Filed weekly. Not all of it true. None of it made up.

Haint blue paint colors and how to pick one

Haint blue is not one paint color. It is a family of pale blue-greens, and the names most often sold under it are Sherwin-Williams Atmospheric (SW 6505), Sherwin-Williams Rainwashed (SW 6211), Benjamin Moore Palladian Blue (HC-144) and Benjamin Moore Woodlawn Blue (HC-147). All four exist in the current catalogs; I checked.

The rest of this page is how to choose among them. The story of why the color exists is told in full at Haint Blue, the Boo Hag and the Plat Eye; one paragraph of it follows for anyone who came here from a paint aisle.

Where haint blue comes from

The custom is Gullah, from the Lowcountry of South Carolina and Georgia. A haint is a haunt, a restless spirit, and in the belief the color kept one off the porch either by passing for sky, which a spirit would drift through, or for water, which a spirit could not cross. The earliest pigment was crushed indigo, which was a major plantation crop here before the Revolution and was grown by enslaved people; some mixes used lime and milk. The slave quarters at the Owens-Thomas House in Savannah, built in the early 1800s, have a haint blue ceiling. The modern claim that the color keeps wasps and spiders away has, according to a Smithsonian entomologist quoted on the subject, no research behind it. The ceilings get painted anyway.

Which named paints are actually haint blue?

There is no official haint blue. Paint companies do not certify folklore. What exists is a set of colors that decorators and porch owners name again and again, and these four I verified on the manufacturers’ own pages:

  • Sherwin-Williams Atmospheric, SW 6505. Filed under Blue. Light and airy, the one most often named first in haint blue lists.
  • Sherwin-Williams Rainwashed, SW 6211. Sherwin-Williams files this one under Green, which tells you about its undertone. It leans toward the trees.
  • Benjamin Moore Palladian Blue, HC-144. From the Historical Colors collection. LRV 60.4, hex #C1D1C9. Benjamin Moore calls it a soft blue-green. It is the single most recommended haint blue on the sites I read.
  • Benjamin Moore Woodlawn Blue, HC-147. Also Historical Colors. LRV 60.65, hex #C1D0CA. A near sibling of Palladian, slightly cooler.

Other names you will see cited: Sherwin-Williams Tradewind (SW 6218), Sea Salt (SW 6204) and Tidewater (SW 6477); Benjamin Moore Wythe Blue (HC-143) and Harbor Haze (2136-60); and Behr Porch Ceiling (PPF-27). I could not open Behr’s page to confirm that last one, and the others I have taken from decorators rather than from the manufacturers, so treat them as leads. There is no color I could find literally named “Haint Blue” at Behr, Sherwin-Williams or Benjamin Moore.

Green-blue or gray-blue?

Every haint blue sits between two poles. The green-leaning ones (Rainwashed, Palladian, Sea Salt) read as the color of the marsh on a gray day and sit well against white clapboard and live oaks. The grayer, cooler ones (Woodlawn, Atmospheric, Harbor Haze) read closer to the sky and hold their own against brick and dark trim. A useful rule from a decorator who has painted a dozen porch ceilings: a haint blue looks bluer beside a green house and greener beside a blue house. Paint a sample board, hold it to the ceiling, and look at it at noon and at dusk before you buy a gallon.

Porch ceiling or shutters?

The porch ceiling is the traditional place, and the one where a pale color works. The Gullah also painted doors, window frames and shutters. If you want haint blue on shutters, go a step darker and more saturated than you would overhead: a ceiling color on a shutter in direct sun washes out to nothing. Most haint blues used on ceilings have a light reflectance value between 55 and 65, which is why they look like shade rather than paint.

What finish?

Exterior-grade paint, always, even on a ceiling that never sees rain; porches are damp. Satin or semi-gloss. Semi-gloss wipes clean of pollen and cobwebs; satin reads flatter and closer to the old lime washes. Prime bare wood, metal ceilings, or anything going from dark to light.

How it reads in Lowcountry light versus elsewhere

The Lowcountry is humid and the light is diffuse for much of the year. Under that sky a pale blue-green ceiling disappears into the air above it, which is the whole effect. In the dry clear light of the Southwest or the Rockies the same color turns mint and looks painted. If you are far from the coast, go a shade grayer and a shade darker than what the Charleston photographs show you. If you are in the Lowcountry, trust the chip.

How to do it

  1. Pick two candidates from the verified list, one greener and one grayer.
  2. Buy sample pots and paint two-foot boards. Hold them flat to the ceiling, not against a wall.
  3. Look at them in morning, noon and evening light, with the porch furniture in place.
  4. Clean the ceiling, prime if needed, and cut in the edges by hand. Two coats.
  5. Wait a day before you put the chairs back.

A note on where the color’s story lives. Haint blue is Gullah and coastal, but the plantation road out of Charleston, the Ashley River Road, runs past Drayton Hall and Middleton Place and on into Dorchester County, and the belief traveled with the people who were made to work that ground. The county history has that part, and the dispatches have the porches.

Sources