Mild Porpoise
Mild Porpoise (#07191B) 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 (186°, 59%, 7%) 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
Old English milde, gentle — used as a color modifier since the medieval period for hues that read as moderate and unaggressive. Mild gray, mild beige: low saturation combined with optical mildness. Sits at the neutral-bucket center alongside gentle and easy.
Cosmopolitan Phocoenidae family — small-cetacean aquatic mammals of temperate-and-arctic coastal waters, with deep-glossy-gray dorsal-skin and white-or-cream ventral-skin. Porpoise color refers to a Phocoena phocoena (harbor porpoise) dorsal-skin in raking sun off the Cornish-coast: a dark cool-gray with the glossy finish of fluid-dynamic-streamlined cetacean-skin against the Bristol-Channel sea-state.
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.