Need...More...Fic!!!
The paint color could simply be that the result of a coin toss, which as we all know, has a probability of 50% heads to 50% tails, or 1/2. That means that if a coin is tossed 100, it should come up heads 50-ish times. With Mayson alive, suppose she and Dan toss a coin to settle something. Whichever end came up, all coin tosses in the *world* are now that much more likely to come up the other way, to fulfil the law of probability. So 200 years later, when someone says "Okay, heads we'll go with green; and tails we'll go with that stupid color *you* like..."
It's a thought, anyway.
