Homemade Carbon
Homemade Carbon (#040F0E) is a deep cyan with a cool character. It leans cool, sitting on the blue, green, and violet side of the wheel. Quiet and dependable, a fit for product UI and data visualization. Its HSL profile (175°, 58%, 4%) places it in the balanced band at a dark lightness. It works well as a headline, icon, or deep background in an otherwise light layout, pairing cleanly with cream, bone, and warm neutrals. For a confident two-color system, pair it with its complementary red. For something softer, pull in its analogous neighbors on either side of the wheel.
Etymology
English compound home + past-participle made — sharing root with make. As a color modifier, homemade implies a neutral-and-handcrafted-and-domestic quality, the neutral color of American-and-English-cottage hand-made-and-home-craft household-textile-and-pottery surface-finish. Sits at the neutral-and-traditional end of the grid, parallel to handmade and handcrafted in usage.
Element C, atomic number 6 — the basis of all known life and the residue of every burned thing. Carbon black is the pigment produced by incomplete combustion of oil or natural gas, used since prehistory in cave paintings and now in printer toner. The color refers to a freshly produced carbon black: a deep, slightly muted matte black with the powdery finish of micron-scale soot particles. Warmer than ink, drier than pitch.
Closest matches
The nearest named color in three reference sources, ranked by perceptual distance (ΔE76 in CIELAB). ΔE < 1 is imperceptible to most viewers; ΔE > 10 is clearly different. When two sources point to the same hex they’re merged into one tile; click any to open that color’s page.
Variations
Click any swatch to exploreHarmonies
Accessibility
How this color appears to viewers with the four major color-vision-deficiency types. Computed via the Machado (2009) physiologically-based model. If a tile matches the original, the color reads the same to that viewer.
The color used as foreground text against pure white and pure black, with the contrast ratio and WCAG 2.1 grade. Aim for AA (4.5:1) for body text and AA Large (3:1) for 18 pt+ headlines; AAA (7:1) is the gold standard for long-form reading surfaces.
Wide gamut
The CSS Color 4 wide-gamut form of this color. Both swatches render the same color on every display — the P3 form only diverges from sRGB when a designer pushes channels outside sRGB's reach.
This color sits well within the sRGB cube. P3 and sRGB share the gray axis and most desaturated tones, so a P3 display renders this identically to an sRGB display.