If the bathroom is very small (less than 2 square meters), it's best to decorate it in one of these colors, but choose a very light, desaturated shade. It's also better to use two shades of the same color: one darker, the other lighter, and tile the short walls with the lighter shade and the long walls with the darker shade. This technique will greatly increase the apparent size of the room. Naturally, if you use colored fixtures, especially those with a pattern, the bathroom tiles should be monochromatic and neutral in tone.

If the bathroom is small, but still more than 2 square meters, it's best to use two different colors. They should complement each other: either a nuance, that is, similar shades of roughly the same color range: pink and lilac, blue and light blue, or a contrast: yellow and blue, purple and orange. As counterintuitive as it may seem, contrast is suitable for a small bathroom.

However, the contrasting colors in this case should not be bright, and the brighter color should be limited. For example, the main tile could be light lilac, and one vertical stripe could be muted orange. To complement this stripe, you could scatter a few orange tiles as decoration, or create another decorative horizontal stripe around the sink, alternating orange and lilac tiles. A border could also serve as a complementary color.

When using two colors in a bathroom, the complementary tile can feature a pattern, even a large one. For example, if the bathroom is beige, the complementary tile could be a black and brown pattern, perhaps in an African style.

Sometimes, however, you can use bright contrasting colors. But this is only true if the bright color isn't used as a single block. For example, against the same white tile backdrop, you can create insets of individual bright red tiles. This would also work well in a small bathroom.

For those who love bright colors, you can always lay out the tiles diagonally or create a wave pattern by cutting the tiles as desired. This can further visually enlarge a small bathroom, despite the use of intense, bright colors.

If you want to use not two, but three or four different colors or shades in your bathroom, then mosaic is the way to go. Mosaic tiles so dramatically increase the apparent size of the room that any amount of color won't make your bathroom feel smaller.