Shadowed Bayadere
Shadowed Bayadere (#1B3A9C) is a true blue 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 (226°, 70%, 36%) places it in the balanced band at a mid lightness. It works across type, buttons, and borders, saturated enough to feel deliberate but balanced enough to not fight the rest of the palette. For a confident two-color system, pair it with its complementary amber. For something softer, pull in its analogous neighbors on either side of the wheel.
Etymology
The past participle of shadow, used adjectivally for a color that reads as if partially in shadow rather than fully lit. Implies the slight darkening and cooling that any color undergoes when light is reduced — not the absence of color but the muting of it. Sits in the deep-and-cool end of the engine's grid, lighter than inky and warmer than somber.
A traditional Indian dance — and the silk fabric whose multicolored vertical stripes were named after the bayadères, the temple dancers of South India. Bayadere blue refers to one of the dominant stripe colors in nineteenth-century French bayadère silks: a saturated, slightly green-shifted deep blue with the high shine of dyed silk. Cooler than royal, warmer than navy, with the textile-trade weight of a fabric named for a dance.
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.