I know this is always a debate and seems to largely depend on what section and color. Here's my situation.

My passenger fender is damaged. I have a replacement fender and I was hoping to get by with having the shop paint it unattached (no prep).

99 Accord and color is Flamenco black. The car has been mostly garage kept so the rest of the body paint is in very good condition.

I've not had a lot of experience with paint so I was hoping someone here might know if this color black on a fender will look ok with no blending.

 

You have a car that's ~14 years old. Regardless of how well you took care of it the paint is going to have faded some and it's not going to be a perfect match. That's the whole purpose of blending... I don't think there's any debate about it.

 

probably right. was hoping with black it might be less noticeable. i want it to look good but not trying to win any awards.

 

I'll add that metallic colors are the worst (IMO) to try to do this without blending. We had our Heather Mist Metallic bumper repainted and it stuck out like a sore thumb. Alone it looked pretty spot on, but when you compared the two it was just ridiculously off.

That said, I had my S2000 CR trunk and wing (originally black) painted New Formula Red for my car and the guy (friend) eyeballed it and had a perfect match. I can't remember how metallic your color is but if it's a solid color it's likely not going to be too terribly off.

 

Flamenco black pearl. I know nothing about paint but was hoping the mixing system can account for fading to some extent.

 

Nope it will need to be blended to hood and door. Bumpers dont match most the time from the factory so I wouldnt worry about that. The rule of thumb is 18 inches from panal and re clear all the panals that need to be blended not clear blend. There are diffrent variences from the factory on the same color. Thats because, the companys buy as much of the paint as they can at one time and most paint supplyers cant keep up with demand so they will bring in other companys to supply paint aswell. Now most bumpers are painted in other factorys or in diffrent paint booths then the bodies are. But there are other things that affect color and metalic flake like, humidity, who set up the paint machine/ painters, paint supplier and so on. Hope this helps