Fresh Parsec Teal
Fresh Parsec Teal (#08858D) is a deep cyan with a jewel character. It carries the deep, saturated richness of a gemstone. Authoritative and slightly formal, it works well for type and heavy UI elements. Its HSL profile (184°, 89%, 29%) places it in the highly saturated band at a dark lightness. Best used in small doses, like logos, CTAs, focus rings, or highlight text, where its saturation becomes a feature rather than noise. 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 fersc, unsalted / not stale — sharing root with German frisch. As a color modifier, fresh implies a clear-and-newly-applied quality where the hue carries the just-emerged visual register. Sits at the crisp-and-clean end of the grid, parallel to crisp and new in usage.
Coined 1913, parallax-second. As a color modifier, parsec implies a deep-space-and-stellar-distance quality, the visual register of 3.26-light-year-parsec hand-deep-space-and-stellar-distance 3.26-light-year-and-Hipparcos-and-Gaia-parsec parsec-and-deep-space-and-stellar-distance surfaces under 3.26-light-year-and-Hipparcos-and-Gaia-parsec galactic-cartography-and-stellar-cradle stellar-distance-light. Sits at the modifier-and-cosmic end of the grid, parallel to orbit and nebula in usage.
Anas crecca, the small dabbling duck whose male in breeding plumage sports a chestnut head crossed by a glossy green-blue stripe. The color refers to that stripe — the iridescent panel just behind the eye: a saturated, slightly muted blue-green with the optical depth of structural color rather than pigment. Cooler than cypress, warmer than cerulean, with the ornithological specificity of a color named for one feather of one bird.
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.