Tarry Niagara
Tarry Niagara (#162435) is a deep azure 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 (213°, 41%, 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 orange. For something softer, pull in its analogous neighbors on either side of the wheel.
Etymology
Old English teru, tar — adjectival suffix -y. As a color modifier, tarry implies the deep-glossy-black quality of bitumen-and-petroleum-tar viscous-residue surfaces, particularly the La-Brea-and-Trinidad-Pitch-Lake natural-asphalt seeps. Sits at the deep-and-warm end of the grid, parallel to pitchy and bituminous in usage.
The triple waterfall on the Niagara River between New York and Ontario — the largest waterfall by flow rate east of the Mississippi. Niagara blue refers to the color of the water as it falls: a saturated, slightly green-shifted deep blue with the optical complexity of glacial-melt water mixed with limestone-derived calcium carbonate. Cooler than turquoise, deeper than aqua, with the natural-wonder weight of a falls visited by millions annually.
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.