Quick and Easy, for a Price

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YOU can tell it’s thicker the minute you open the can,” said Ernest Rezik, a contractor who has painted thousands of walls in Manhattan, Queens and Brooklyn.

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Evan Sung for The New York Times

THE COVER-UP To test claims about a new paint from Benjamin Moore, the author set his young sons to work decorating his living room walls.

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Photographs by Evan Sung for The New York Times

Then he brought in a professional painter, top, to cover different areas of the mural with a single coat of the new paint or of standard latex paint. When the mural was covered, the judges were ready to render their verdict.

Mr. Rezik was about to paint a wall in my apartment using Aura, a new paint from Benjamin Moore that the company claims can cover most surfaces in a single coat. The paint, which was introduced on the West Coast in September and will be available on the East Coast in late January, is also supposed to release fewer environment-damaging volatile organic compounds, or V.O.C.’s, than other paints.

To test the company’s claim that changing the color of a wall — even from black to white — can be accomplished with one coat of Aura (or at the most two, according to the company), I asked my 4-year-old sons, Aaron and Jacob, to paint a mural in a corner of my apartment. The result, reminiscent of the work of Paul Klee, was a mass of purple, brown and dark red blobs (or as Benjamin Moore calls them, Chambord, Carob and Moroccan Spice).

Two days later, Mr. Rezik arrived to repaint the wall white. First, he dipped a roller into a can of Benjamin Moore’s Regal, its most popular line of latex paint, which costs less than $30 a can in the New York area. It covered pretty well, but bits of my sons’ handiwork were still visible.

Then he tried the new paint, which lists for $55 a can, on another section of the wall. The dark colors disappeared immediately. When it was time to paint the baseboard, where remnants of my sons’ artwork had dripped, Mr. Rezik said he really noticed the difference. Because Aura is thicker than regular latex paint, he said, “you can control the amount of paint on the brush better” — meaning you can use more of it without worrying about drips. He was able to cover several purple spots easily in one go-over.

Aura also dries in minutes, which I confirmed with my own fingers, and is practically odor-free. Carl Minchew, the company’s director of product development, claims that some customers have painted their dining rooms and then had guests for dinner the same day.

At Benjamin Moore’s research center, in Flanders, N.J., Mr. Minchew showed me the results of various tests that, he said, demonstrated Aura’s durability, including one in which a blue enamel surface was painted white with Aura and then scrubbed at least 1,000 times, with little apparent damage. “Obviously, if we had flunked, I wouldn’t show you this,” he said cheerfully.

Mr. Minchew said an important impetus for developing the new paint came from an increase in governmental restrictions on V.O.C.’s, “especially in California, which has the most stringent regulations.” As with auto emissions, California took the lead in regulating V.O.C. emissions a few years ago. Among other things, the state restricted paint stores from ordering new supplies of many oil-based paints (which, although long prized by house painters for their appearance and durability, emit considerably more V.O.C.’s than latex paints), and more recently mid-Atlantic states, including New York, have followed suit.

Also important to the formulation of Aura, according to Mr. Minchew, was the problem of V.O.C.’s in colorants. Until the 1970s, he said, most paints in the United States were sold off the shelf in stock colors. But as consumers began to demand more color choice, the model shifted to one in which stores stocked cans of “paint base” and added tiny drops of colorants to create thousands of different hues.

Companies began producing colorants that would work with any paint base, oil or latex, adding a wide variety of chemical solvents to make the colorants adaptable. These solvents contained V.O.C.’s and “didn’t necessarily make the best paint,” said Barry Chadwick, Benjamin Moore’s vice president for product development.

Mr. Minchew said, “We realized that if we made a colorant that only has to go into latex base, and a latex base that only has to work with that colorant, we could make both of them better,” while using fewer V.O.C.-emitting compounds.

To sell Aura, Benjamin Moore will need the cooperation of retailers, who will have to decide whether to invest in new machines — which can cost $10,000 or more — that dispense the new paint. (Because Aura colorants dry so quickly, they harden before they can get through a conventional paint dispenser; Mr. Minchew’s team spent three years working with a Finnish company to create a new machine that uses water to keep its nozzles moist.)

Because it costs far more than a paint like Regal, which is already considered high-end, Aura has a marketing mountain to climb with consumers. Mr. Chadwick said it has been doing well on the West Coast.

Allen Blanson, the assistant manager of East Bay Paints in Albany, Calif., said Aura “has been flying off the shelves” at the store, an independent business that sells Benjamin Moore and Pratt & Lambert paints. But Benjamin Moore executives are waiting to see how East Coast consumers will react to the “super premium” pricing.

Michael Pintchik, the president of the family-owned store in Brooklyn that bears his name, said that he was initially concerned that the price would discourage consumers, but now he thinks they may actually save money by using the paint, since one gallon may do the work of two. Mr. Minchew acknowledged that Benjamin Moore could end up selling less paint. “We’d like to think we’re going to get enough people buying our paint, instead of someone else’s, to make up the difference,” he said.

¶ Sunday, December 24, 2006