Spare Citadel
Spare Citadel (#151017) is a deep violet with an earthy character. It leans grounded and natural, the kind of color that plays well with wood, clay, linen, and warm neutrals. Its HSL profile (283°, 18%, 8%) places it in the muted 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 green. For something softer, pull in its analogous neighbors on either side of the wheel.
Etymology
Old English spær, frugal, scant — used as a color modifier since the seventeenth century for hues that read as minimal and unornamented. Spare gray, spare white: very low saturation combined with optical restraint. Sits at the neutral-bucket alongside bare and plain.
Old French citadelle, little city — the deep-cool-gray fortified-stone keep of medieval-and-Renaissance European fortress architecture, particularly the Carcassonne, Edinburgh, and Acre citadels. Citadel color refers to an Edinburgh-Castle outer-wall face in November-overcast light: a dark cool-gray with the matte finish of Carboniferous-Sandstone-and-Volcanic-Plug hand-quarried fortification stone.
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.