Paint

Bathroom paint tested in an apartment with no fan

Five paints, one windowless bathroom, four months of hot showers and a mildew count.

By Ike Sandoval · August 9, 2026

My bathroom has no window and no fan. There is a grille in the ceiling that was connected to something once, and if you hold a tissue up to it the tissue does not move. The building is a 1904 three-decker in Holyoke, and the walls are plaster with a skim coat of joint compound over sixty years of previous paint.

This is an ordinary valley rental bathroom. In April I taped the room into five sections, painted each one with a different bathroom paint, and lived in it for four months.

How the test ran

Five paints, all sold for kitchens and bathrooms, all rolled the same afternoon over one coat of Zinsser Bulls Eye 1-2-3, two coats each, 3/8 inch nap. I kept a cheap digital hygrometer on the toilet tank and wrote down the peak reading after showers and how long the room took to come back under 60 percent relative humidity.

Two adults use this bathroom. From April 6 to August 4 that came to 431 showers, most of them seven to twelve minutes. Peak humidity after a normal shower was 91 percent. After a long one it pinned at 96 and stayed there. With the door open the room took 55 to 70 minutes to drop under 60 percent. With the door shut it took over three hours, and in July it sometimes never got there before the next shower.

I checked each panel weekly for mildew spots, blistering and softening. The mildew count below is visible spots larger than a pinhead at four months, counted with a flashlight held flat to the wall. Nobody scrubbed anything during the test. I wanted to know what the paint does when you ignore it, because that is what actually happens.

1. Sherwin-Williams Duration Home, satin

$95 a gallon at the shelf price, and the store discounts it often enough that you should wait. Four mildew spots at four months, all four of them in the corner where the ceiling meets the shower wall, which is where every panel failed first. No blistering. The film still feels hard.

The clear winner, and it was not close. The satin sheen sheds water instead of drinking it, and after a shower you can watch condensation bead on this panel while the panel next to it goes dull and damp looking. The four spots wiped off with a damp rag and nothing came back. Two complaints. Satin on old plaster shows every wave in the wall, and this bathroom has plenty. And the paint is thick, so cutting the ceiling line took me twice as long as it should have. Here I care more about the mildew.

2. Benjamin Moore Aura Bath and Spa, matte

$92 a gallon, and the only matte in this test I would defend. Six mildew spots, five in the ceiling corner and one behind the toilet where air does not move.

Almost as good as the Duration Home, and much better looking. Matte on a wall this lumpy is a mercy, and the color sat dead flat with no roller tracking anywhere. What keeps it second is what you do afterward. When I wiped the ceiling corner spots off the Duration Home panel, the wall looked the same. When I wiped them off this one, the rag left a faint burnished halo I can still see. There is also a two inch blister at the top edge, where a previous tenant's oil paint is probably still hiding. That is the wall's fault more than the paint's.

3. Zinsser Perma-White, satin

$42 a gallon, the cheapest can in the test by a nose and the best deal in it by a mile. Seven mildew spots, all along the ceiling line. No blistering, film still firm at four months.

Three spots behind the winner for less than half the money. The catch is the paint itself, which is thin and low on hide. Two coats over a mid tone left the old wall showing through in patches and I went back for a third, which eats the price advantage and a Sunday. The sheen is lower than the label suggests, so it does not bead water the way the Duration Home panel does. It just does not seem to care.

This is the paint I would hand somebody painting a rental bathroom they do not intend to be in for long.

4. Behr Premium Plus Bath, satin

$38 a gallon at the Hadley store. Nineteen mildew spots, and by August the top of the panel had a gray cast a rag would not take off.

The word Bath on the can is doing heavy lifting. This paint is fine on a bathroom wall that gets a fan or a window, and I have it in a bathroom with both and no complaints there. This bathroom has neither, so by mid-June the difference between this panel and the three above it was obvious from the doorway. There is a blister the size of a nickel below the ceiling line. I pressed it in July and it was soft. It is still there.

5. Valspar Signature, matte

$47 a gallon at Lowe's. Thirty-eight mildew spots, and I stopped counting carefully in the mid-thirties because they had run together along the ceiling.

Matte in a room that hits 96 percent humidity is a bad idea and I knew it going in. The can does say mildew resistant, and the panel proves that the phrase assumes a room that dries out at some point in the day. The film went soft. In June I could dent it with a thumbnail, and in July a hand towel leaning against it for two days left a permanent mark. There is blistering across a foot of the top edge.

Nothing here is wrong with this paint on a bedroom wall. It is the wrong tool, at $47 a gallon.

I painted over this panel in August with the Duration Home. That is the review.

What matters more than the paint

All five panels failed in the same corner first, where the ceiling meets the shower wall, roughly a month apart in rank order. The paint choice bought me time rather than immunity. What bought more time was leaving the door open after every shower, which cut the recovery from three hours to about an hour, and a $19 box fan on the floor pointed at the doorway, which cut it to 35 minutes.

Ask the landlord about the dead ceiling grille. Mine turned out to be ducted to a fan unit in the attic that has not run since a roof job in 2014. Getting that fixed would do more for this bathroom than any gallon in the test.

Until then, buy the Duration Home when it goes on sale, paint the ceiling with it too, and open the door.