colors
Back to gallery

Refined Jet

#171e1b
Notes

Refined Jet (#171E1B) 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 (154°, 13%, 10%) 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 magenta. For something softer, pull in its analogous neighbors on either side of the wheel.

HEX
#171e1b
RGB
rgb(23, 30, 27)
HSL
hsl(154, 13%, 10%)
HWB
hwb(154 9% 88%)
OKLCH
oklch(22.7% 0.012 167.5)
P3
color(display-p3 0.0956 0.1168 0.1065)
HSV
hsv(154, 23%, 12%)
LAB
lab(10.48% -4.03 0.99)
LCH
lch(10.48% 4.15 166.15)
CMYK
cmyk(23%, 0%, 10%, 88%)

Etymology

Refined
adjective

Latin re- plus fīnis — past-participle of refine. As a color modifier, refined implies a neutral-and-elegantly-stripped-down-and-cultivated quality, the neutral color of Edwardian-and-Belle-Époque refined-and-stripped-of-excess elegant-and-cultivated interior-decoration-and-dress-attire coordinated-color tone. Sits at the neutral-and-cultivated end of the grid, parallel to cultured and polished in usage.

Jet
noun

Fossilized wood from the Araucaria coniferous trees of the Jurassic period — compressed for 180 million years into a hard, polishable lignite. Mined principally at Whitby on the Yorkshire coast since the Bronze Age and worn as Victorian mourning jewelry after Albert's death in 1861. The color refers to a polished Whitby jet cabochon: a deep, slightly muted near-black with the satin finish of fossilized wood.

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 explore

Harmonies

This color has effectively no chroma (OKLCH C = 0.012) — it’s on the grayscale axis. Hue rotations don’t change a grayscale color, so complementary, analogous, triadic, and split-complementary all reduce to the same value. They aren’t shown because four identical tiles would be misleading.

Accessibility

Color-vision simulation

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.

#171e1b
Original
#1e1d1b
Protanopia
#1c1c1b
Deuteranopia
#161e1d
Tritanopia
#1c1c1c
Achromatopsia
WCAG contrast

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.

The quick brown foxSample body text at normal size. The wcag minimum for body contrast is 4.5:1 (AA) or 7:1 (AAA).
AAAon White
16.96:1
The quick brown foxSample body text at normal size. The wcag minimum for body contrast is 4.5:1 (AA) or 7:1 (AAA).
Failon Black
1.24:1

Wide gamut

Display P3 representation

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.

sRGB hex
sRGB hex
##171E1B
Display P3
Display P3
color(display-p3 0.0956 0.1168 0.1065)
Inside sRGBOKLCH chroma 0.012

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.

Related Colors

Canvas