Refined Tephra
Refined Tephra (#0A1026) is a deep blue 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 (227°, 58%, 9%) 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 amber. For something softer, pull in its analogous neighbors on either side of the wheel.
Etymology
Latin re- plus fīnis — past-participle of refine. As a color modifier, refined implies a neutral-and-elegantly-stripped-down-and-cultivated quality, the neutral color of Edwardian-and-Belle-Époque refined-and-stripped-of-excess elegant-and-cultivated interior-decoration-and-dress-attire coordinated-color tone. Sits at the neutral-and-cultivated end of the grid, parallel to cultured and polished in usage.
Greek téphra, ash — the deep-cool-gray air-fall volcanic-ash deposits of Plinian eruption-columns, particularly the Vesuvius 79 CE deposits at Pompeii and Herculaneum. Tephra color refers to a Pompeii archaeological-section tephra-deposit face in raking light: a dark cool-gray with the matte finish of cooling-rate-quenched glass-and-pumice volcanic-ash on a 79-CE Pompeian roof-collapse stratum.
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.