Airfix Enamel paints were already listed in the first Airfix catalog (1962) and initially came in tall glass bottles, in 1973 the bottles were changed to tins carrying the text 'new formula' on the back.The Airfix paints were manufactured by Tunbridges Ltd., who were known for their Joy paints in the UK, until Borden (then Humbrol parent company) took over Airfix in 1986.
In the Borden era Airfix paints were briefly manufactured by Humbrol and the taller tins were replaced by regular Humbrol tins, then the Airfix paint range was discontinued.
Despite offering only a limited number of different colours, a broad range of models including aircraft, vehicles, ships and figures could be painted with reasonable accuracy.
Early on the range already contained some unique colours such as M14 Buff (actually unbleached linen, for ship sails), M16 Vellum (for drum skins), M20 Aircraft Grey/Green (for RAF WW2 era aircraft interiors), M22 RAF Blue/Grey (for WW2 and post-war era RAF vehicles), the greyish metallic G16 Middle Graphite and two shades of matt dark green (M3 and M17) for WW2 Luftwaffe camouflage.
One property Airfix enamels share with old Humbrol enamels is that in properly sealed tins the paint will last for decades.
As Airfix paints were often hard to find outside of the UK, Humbrol issued cross-reference lists for finding the closest matching Humbrol colour for a given Airfix paint code. However as Humbrol used different pigments, the matches were often not exact.
For the Humbrol matches in the lists below, I used official Humbrol cross-reference lists as a starting point, but as several of these cross-reference lists contained obvious errors I tried to correct any errors I could find.
In the Notes column I added some matches that I found to be closer than the official Humbrol ones.
As Humbrol took over manufacturing the Airfix paints in 1986, I put the Humbrol equivalents of the colours in the '1986' column.
