Gloomy Bluestem
Gloomy Bluestem (#09221C) is a deep teal 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 (166°, 58%, 8%) 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
Middle English gloumen, to look glum — adjectival suffix -y. As a color modifier, gloomy implies a deep-and-cool-and-overcast quality, the dark cool-gray of Yorkshire-Moors and Scottish-Highlands late-autumn atmospheric-overcast sky. Sits at the deep-and-cool end of the grid, parallel to sullen and somber.
The genera Andropogon and Schizachyrium — North American native prairie grasses whose stems shift from green to blue-purple in autumn. The color refers to S. scoparium (little bluestem) in midsummer: a soft, slightly cool blue-green-gray with the matte finish of upright prairie grass.
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.