In my recent review of The Craft I mentioned that there's almost nothing that ties this movie specifically to the 1990s. But that isn't entirely true: in an early scene when the new family is moving into their giant ramshackle mansion, the ENTIRE SET has been faux finished within an inch of its life.
Looking back on it, the trend for faux finishing seems just so quintessentially 1990s. Can't afford travertine floors? Paint them to look like it! Can't afford to swap your boring old wall out for a marble one? Paint it to look like it! Wish your clothes dresser was actually made out of burnished gold leaf? Paint it to look like it!
In truth, no faux finish was ever convincing. They never looked like anything other than "an item which has had a faux finishing treatment applied to it." But we played along. The emperor's new faux finished clothes were adorable, we exclaimed. So delicately feathered!
One of the most popular faux finishes was marbleizing. Typically you used a feather or a particular kind of paint brush to paint veins of marble against a pale background. This could easily go horribly wrong, if you mis-judged how many veins a slab of marble actually has. When faux finishing it was hard to resist the call of "more is more," and you usually ended up with a piece that looked more "hectic" than "made of marble."
Another was a technique I call "dual tone blotchiness." This is the technique that was used in the foyer of the mansion in The Craft. First you put down a blotchy layer of, say, brick red. Then you add a blotchy layer of, say, russet gold. Then you sort of blotchify the whole thing. I guess it was meant to look Italian and fabulous, like vintage wallpaper in some basement wine store in the South of France. As if you had wallpapered in distressed golden parchment paper, or as if your wall was actually the background of a Rembrandt painting. Mostly it looked blotchy and cheap.
(Except that this treatment was popular in many coffee houses, who wisely paired it with black and dark green fixtures. In that setting I think it looks awesome, and I still do today. I don't know why.)
Most faux finishing appealed to the luxury/"dreaming of a villa in the South of France" set. But if you take lavender paint and apply a blotchy layer of silver metallic, you had your "country style" themes covered, too. It was the ugly technique that appealed to everyone!