Macabre Saint-Petersburg
Macabre Saint-Petersburg (#0B2042) is a deep azure 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 (217°, 71%, 15%) 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
French macabre, possibly from Macabre (the medieval Danse Macabre) or Hebrew meqabber (gravedigger). As a color modifier, macabre implies a deep-and-funereal-and-uncanny quality, the dark cool-gray of medieval-and-Victorian memento-mori iconography. Sits at the deep-and-funereal end of the grid, parallel to funereal with uncanny-and-grotesque overtone.
The Russian Baltic city founded by Peter the Great — and the deep blue of the Neva River, the Hermitage Imperial palace's Catherine Hall, and the Imperial Navy uniforms based here. Saint-Petersburg color refers to a Catherine Hall blue-and-gold interior: a saturated, slightly cool deep blue with the matte finish of distemper-painted plaster.
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.