Hash, unlike if, has no order. If the order matters, you might need something like the following (alternatives in regexes match from the leftmost one):

my @keys
    = ('test', 'dark', 'white', 'house', 'all things', 'money', 'count
+ry');

my @values
    = qw(blue   black   light    home     multi         value    USA);

my $regex = join '|', @keys; # "map quotemeta" might be needed for ugl
+ier keys
$regex = qr/($regex)/;

my %switch;
@switch{@keys} = @values;

my $change;
if ($item =~ $regex) {
    $change = $switch{$1};
} else {
    $change = "neutral";
}

print "Final Item = $change.\n";
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