Cool Coiled Turquoise
Cool Coiled Turquoise (#16BDCA) is a true cyan with a vibrant character. It holds its own as a focal accent, carrying visual weight without tipping into neon territory. Its HSL profile (184°, 80%, 44%) places it in the highly saturated band at a mid lightness. Best used in small doses, like logos, CTAs, focus rings, or highlight text, where its saturation becomes a feature rather than noise. 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 cōl, of low temperature — used as a color modifier as the complement to warm. Cool gray, cool blue: the optical impression of a slight blue-green shift, even within otherwise warm or neutral hues. Sits across the crisp, hushed, pale, and neutral buckets.
Old French coillir, to-collect. As a color modifier, coiled implies a wound-and-spiral quality, the visual register of hand-coiled-rope-and-clay hand-coiled-and-wound rope-and-clay-and-pottery hand-coiled-and-wound coil-and-spiral-and-pottery surfaces under hand-coiled-and-wound pottery-and-rope workshop-light. Sits at the modifier-and-texture end of the grid, parallel to twined and looped in usage.
The hydrated copper-aluminum phosphate mined in Persia and the American Southwest for thousands of years — the firuze of Iran, the chalchihuitl of Mesoamerica, the heart of Pueblo and Navajo silverwork. The color refers to a fine Sleeping Beauty turquoise from Arizona: a saturated, slightly green-shifted blue with the slight matrix of host-rock veining. Brighter than persian, lighter than cerulean.
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.