Naomi Bregman

Naomi Bregman is the colour columnist for Ruvyne, writing from London on pigment, light and the distance between the two. She trained as a cosmetic formulator before moving into architectural paint, and treats the two trades as a single discipline with two customer bases.

Bregman began at a contract manufacturer outside Hertfordshire, matching foundation shades for brands that did not want their names on the batch sheets. The work was less about invention than tolerance: how far a pigment could drift between production runs before anyone noticed, how a shade oxidised over four hours on a face, why a match made under one lamp fell apart under another. She left with a lasting suspicion of the word natural and a working knowledge of metamerism, which she still considers the most consequential idea in the industry that consumers are never told about. A move to the colour studio of a paint manufacturer in 2019 was, she has said, a change of scale rather than of subject. The questions were identical. A grey specified for a showroom in Manchester had to hold in a north-facing room in November and under whatever the client screwed into the ceiling. Her contributions to two standard colour cards were mostly arguments against colours that performed beautifully in the studio and nowhere else, which is a slower and less popular kind of work than proposing new ones. Her column for Ruvyne runs across beauty and interiors without treating the boundary as meaningful. Recurring preoccupations include the poverty of colour naming, the lighting conditions of shops and their relationship to returns, and the persistent belief that a product behaves the same way for everyone. She lives in north London in a flat whose least useful room, cold and dim for most of the year, has been given over to testing.