Printed Quay Peacock
Printed Quay Peacock (#19698B) is a deep cyan with a jewel character. It carries the deep, saturated richness of a gemstone. Authoritative and slightly formal, it works well for type and heavy UI elements. Its HSL profile (198°, 70%, 32%) 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
Latin premere, to press — past-participle of print. As a color modifier, printed implies a clear-and-impressed-and-multiplied quality, the crisp color of Marimekko-and-Liberty-of-London hand-or-machine-printed textile-and-paper pattern-design. Sits at the crisp-and-printed end of the grid, parallel to stamped and etched in usage.
Old French quai, wharf. As a color modifier, quay implies a stone-built-harbor quality, the visual register of Cornish-and-Mediterranean stone-built fishing-harbor-and-trading-port quay-side stone-paved-and-iron-bollard surfaces in early-morning Mediterranean-and-Cornish-fishing-harbor light. Sits at the modifier-and-place end of the grid, parallel to wharf and jetty in usage.
Pavo cristatus, the Indian peafowl whose male displays the most elaborate sexual ornament in birds — a fan of two-meter eyespotted tail feathers in iridescent blue-green. The color is structural, not pigmented: created by interference patterns in the feather barbules. Peacock blue refers to the dominant body color: a saturated, slightly muted teal-blue with the optical depth of structural color. Cooler than persian, warmer than sapphire.
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.
Moderately saturated colors gain a small bump in P3 — the difference is usually visible side-by-side on wide-gamut hardware but won't change the character of the color.