Essential Surma
Essential Surma (#120522) is a deep indigo 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 (267°, 74%, 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 lime. For something softer, pull in its analogous neighbors on either side of the wheel.
Etymology
Latin essentiālis, of-essence — adjectival suffix -al. As a color modifier, essential implies a neutral-and-fundamental-and-stripped-down quality where the hue carries the visual register of Cistercian-and-Bauhaus essential-and-stripped-down architectural-and-design fundamental-element. Sits at the neutral-and-foundational end of the grid, parallel to fundamental and elemental in usage.
Hindi/Urdu सुरमा, eye-cosmetic — the South-Asian equivalent of Arabic kohl, made from finely ground galena and stibnite and used in Mughal-and-modern Indian eye-makeup. Surma color refers to a freshly applied surma eye-line in a Mughal-school 17th-century miniature portrait: a saturated, slightly cool deep black with the matte finish of lead-and-antimony-sulfide cosmetic powder on hand-prepared vasli paper.
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.