Deep Reef
Deep Reef (#164C3E) is a deep teal 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 (164°, 55%, 19%) 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 red. For something softer, pull in its analogous neighbors on either side of the wheel.
Etymology
Old English dēop, profound, far down — sharing root with dive and dipper. In color shorthand, deep implies low lightness combined with high saturation: a deep red is darker than crimson but no less chromatic. Where dark describes value alone, deep implies that the hue still has presence at that low light level. Closer to rich than to somber.
The biological structure built by colonies of Anthozoa corals over millennia — Great Barrier Reef, Caribbean fringing reefs, Maldivian atolls. The color reef refers to the average coloration of a healthy mid-depth Caribbean reef: a soft, slightly muted blue-green with the optical complexity of light scattered through tropical water and refracted off thousands of small organisms. Cooler than seafoam, warmer than turquoise.
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.