I found this out the hard way in our bedroom. My husband and I are very neat (and no kids in the house yet), but the wall around the light switch looked awful after only a few months. After six months of trying to live with it, I finally caved and re-painted in a satin finish last week.

😭thats so sad. The color is stunning but you may be right. Its the living room and shouldnt really be touched much at this point but someone came to install curtain rods and made a total mess of my walls. So just a single coat is enough you think?

Also, whats funny is this doesnt happen with all the matte walls in the house. Some colors dont have this issue.

Is it a darker color? This happened with the deep charcoal paint I used.

What brand and grade of paint? For a matte finish, top tier grades and brands are a lot more durable.

Yes! Its a deeper teal. Lori, I used Benjamin Moore Regal but it was a sherwin williams color. Not sure if that makes a difference

Ahhh. Colorant load required for saturated colors could be why. Paint color formulas are magical mixtures of proportion. Getting a SW dark color mixed in BenM product may have skewed proportions and affected the typical resiliency of Regal.

Oh interesting. Is there another brand you would recommend for SW colors in matte?

Because of the color/colorant issues, I would have chosen Duration matte or Cashmere lo-lustre from SW. I can't remember the last time we spec'd a super dark color from SW. Formulations change all the time; so I would have bought a quart of Cashmere first to see a) what it looked like with that much colorant and b) if it burnished. Duration matte would be plan B. I love the look of Cashmere lo-lustre.

If I had to go BenM, I woulda bought Aura matte instead of Regal.

Thank you! I may try matte again in one of those paints before going eggshell or something with more light reflection. Assuming using Aura for SW color might have the same issue I have now?

I wouldn't expect Aura to have the same issue as Regal - Aura is a different brew. Aura is built for dark colors (IMO). For example, back when reds were popular, I would only specify Ben Moore reds because we could get Aura matte. Dark grays, greens and blacks are stunning in Aura matte, etc.

A quart of Aura matte runs about $40 - worth it to test and make sure it looks and performs they way you want it to.

I know what you mean about reflection. Might be helpful to know that gloss - even high gloss - doesn't deliver any significant light reflectance... technically. It just looks shinier and flashes with spots of glare when the light hits it right.

I used BM Aura and still had streaking issues :-(

Oh nooo, what a bummer! 😞