How To Choose Good Quality Paint

How To Choose Good Quality Paint

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What you should be looking for when you are selecting your paints.

Here at Monsta, we make and sell paints daily, and we talk to a lot of the professional painters out there. Particularly the commercial and full-time painters out there that are servicing the building industry, and they've been telling us what you should look for if you're a DIYer or doing a reno and doing your own paint job.




One of the key things you are looking for with a good quality paint is a paint that gives you good coverage and opacity. Opacity means that when you apply your coats on there you can't see through it. So you want to ensure you've got a full uniform coverage on the surface. Obviously you'll put a first coat on sometimes and you'll see that you might be able to see through that. But the second coat should be total block out.

Wash Ability

So this is when you are cleaning walls. So think of areas like bathrooms, kitchen areas, kids' bedrooms, hallways where dirty hands go or marks are. When you clean that wall the impact that the cleaning has on the gloss level that you've chosen, or the sheen. So if you've got a semigloss, or a low sheen, or even a matte wall. The higher the gloss levels, they are often deemed to be easier to clean because they are shinier, or deemed to be shinier. But a good quality paint will allow you to clean the wall, even if it's not a gloss, it can be a semigloss or a low sheen. You can still get the consistency of the appearance that you're looking for, not that it's actually gone or faded.

So obviously some areas require some good scrub resistance and good washing, to remove any of those marks and stains. If it's got good wash ability or good burnishing resistance, then you'll find that the paint surface will retain its original look that you wanted. That's a good sign of a good quality paint. These are questions you could ask where you're buying your paint from. If you want to ask our Monsta crew we can help you with that as well, because all our paints are ensuring good wear ability, and wash ability, and resistance.



It's the consistency, the strength consistency of batches. Now you might think that's more to do with the manufacturer, but what a couple painters have told us, and it's true when we've spoken to renovators, is that often when we plan our painting, we tend to err on the side of caution. So, we don't go buy extra of what we don't need, and so if you run out of a colour, or you run out of a paint and then you have to go and buy more to match that. Or you might have a job split that you're doing part of it now and another part of it in a month or twos time, and you're not going to buy all the paint right now. As you know you can go to a paint shop, or you come to Monsta and you get the colour and then you want the same colour again. You can get the same colour but it's the consistency of the paint.

So, if you find that it varies slightly, whether it's the strength of the colour, or the consistency of the paint and the way it works and applies. That can give you not just a shade difference but also a slight finish difference because of the texture that can be applied when it's down with the roller. These are common things that many of the professional painters tell us is very, very commonly seen with cheap paints in the marketplace. So that's the one you need to really look at when you are comparing. You might go, oh I'm going to save with a paint grade here, I'll just use this brand because it's going to work for me. It gets the colour I want. But if you find that it's not giving the finish, or a consistent finish then you're going to end up with having to do the job again, and it costs you more. So check that out, it's very important.

Good paint companies have good quality control procedures in terms of what they do to test before it goes out in the can, and to the consumer. 


The last one that comes up from the painters, they call it rheology. Good rheology is more about the consistency and the workability of the paint. So those of you that have painted before, and I've done this often, you pour the paint in a tray, you wet your roller out, you start to roll it up the wall. If you've got really bad spatter resistance, you find that you've got paint spattering all over your face, and all over your clothes. A good paint minimizes that, so when you actually are putting it on with the correct roller on a wall, or on a ceiling you're getting minimum spatter. So that's what painters look at to judge a good paint, very, very important.

If it's too thin when you're laying the brush you'll find that it tends to run or it spatters off quite a lot. This is also seen when you're cutting in. That is commonly seen with a type of, what painters call rheology, but let's call it the workability, with minimizing that spatter. It gives you more time for rolling between coats. So you actually get a good wetting of the edges, what they call that wet edge finish, and that wet edge of application between coats. Or where you've actually cut in versus where you're going to roll over that. That's an important one.

Paint Selections

Next is paint selections and about not getting side tracked on when you're buying a paint from a store. But if you know even in a hardware store, or a paint store, you'll see maybe a brand of paint that has three or four different grades of that paint that you can buy. One is for bathroom and kitchen, ones got super hiding power, one's anti-bacterial properties. Sometimes consumers if they're not educated or aware of it end up buying two or three cans of the same colour, but because they think they're going to go with a certain shade of white for a bathroom. The same as they want outside the bathroom, they buy the bathroom paint and then another paint for outside. You ended up probably with two cans that are left over half way through. The reality is a good paint should be able to do all rooms, and all the bells and whistles.

That's what we do with Monsta, with our makeover paint, we have all those properties in the one grade. You can use them anywhere, they're safe to use in children's or baby rooms, bedrooms, corridors, living areas, wherever you are. 

They come with the super hiding power, the anti bac property, and suitable for the bathroom and kitchen where it handles mould resistance. 

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