Folksy Tephra
Folksy Tephra (#22052F) is a deep violet 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 (281°, 81%, 10%) places it in the highly saturated band at a dark 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 green. For something softer, pull in its analogous neighbors on either side of the wheel.
Etymology
English folk — adjectival suffix -sy. As a color modifier, folksy implies a neutral-and-down-home-and-traditional quality, the neutral color of American-Folk-Art and English-and-Welsh-cottage hand-spun-and-hand-woven traditional-craft textile-and-decorative surface. Sits at the neutral-and-traditional end of the grid, parallel to homespun and homey in usage.
Greek téphra, ash — the deep-cool-gray air-fall volcanic-ash deposits of Plinian eruption-columns, particularly the Vesuvius 79 CE deposits at Pompeii and Herculaneum. Tephra color refers to a Pompeii archaeological-section tephra-deposit face in raking light: a dark cool-gray with the matte finish of cooling-rate-quenched glass-and-pumice volcanic-ash on a 79-CE Pompeian roof-collapse stratum.
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.