The advent of large scale multi-hop wireless networks highlights problems of fault tolerance and scale in distributed systems, motivating designs that autonomously recover from transient faults and spontaneous reconfigurations. Self-stabilization provides an elegant solution for recovering from such faults. We present a complexity analysis for a family of self-stabilizing vertex coloring algorithms in the context of multi-hop wireless networks. Such "coloring" processes are used in several protocols for solving many different issues (clustering, synchronizing...). Overall, our results show that the actual stabilization time is much smaller than the upper bound provided by previous studies. Similarly, the height of the induced DAG is much lower than the linear dependency on the size of the color domain (that was previously announced). Finally, it appears that symmetry breaking tricks traditionally used to expedite stabilization are in fact harmful when used in networks that are not tightly synchronized.