Sylvan Soot
Sylvan Soot (#160616) is a deep violet 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 (300°, 57%, 5%) 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 green. For something softer, pull in its analogous neighbors on either side of the wheel.
Etymology
Latin silvānus, of-the-woods — adjectival suffix -an, derived from silva (forest). As a color modifier, sylvan implies a neutral-and-forest-and-woodland quality, the neutral color of English-and-Welsh deciduous-and-mixed-forest woodland-walking-and-ramble pastoral-and-natural color tone. Sits at the neutral-and-traditional end of the grid, parallel to bucolic and pastoral in usage.
The fine black powder of incomplete combustion — the residue that coats chimney interiors, lamp glass, and the lungs of pre-electric urban populations. Soot refers to the layer that builds inside an oil lamp's chimney: a soft, slightly muted matte black with the powdery finish of micron-scale carbon agglomerates. Warmer than ink, drier than coal, with the industrial-pollution weight of a substance that named the diseases of nineteenth-century chimney sweeps.
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.