RAL isn't really a paint brand in the way Farrow & Ball or Little Greene are — it's a colour standard, originally European and industrial, designed so that a colour means the exact same thing no matter who mixes it. That's the whole point of it, and that's where it earns its keep.
If you're spec'ing powder-coated railings, a steel door, a kitchen island in a sprayed finish, or you need the joiner's lacquer to match the radiator to match the window frames — RAL is brilliant. Everyone in the supply chain speaks RAL, so you get repeatable, batch-to-batch consistency without arguing over whose "grey" is greyer. We hold 207 RAL colours in the FiniSpec library, with the strongest families being greys (36), greens (33), browns (24) and blues (22), and an LRV range from a near-black 0.3 right up to 97.2.
The blues are genuinely lovely if you want something clean and architectural. RAL::Light blue is a soft, calm sky tone; RAL::Azure blue is punchier and more saturated; and RAL::Green blue sits in that handsome teal-leaning territory that works a treat on metal and joinery.
The "but what about" question: should you paint your living room walls in RAL? Honestly — not usually. RAL colours are formulated as flat, accurate industrial standards. They don't carry the pigment depth, the shifting undertones or the chalky decorative finishes that make a F&B Inchyra Blue or a Little Greene wall come alive in changing light. On a big matt wall, RAL can look slightly flat and one-note.
My practical advice: use RAL for the hard stuff — metal, sprayed cabinetry, external joinery, anything that must match exactly across materials — and let a decorative brand handle your walls. You can absolutely run a RAL feature on radiators or a steel-framed door alongside a soft decorative emulsion. That's RAL doing what it's best at, mate: precision, not poetry.