Simple Lead
Simple Lead (#22191B) is a deep red 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 (347°, 15%, 12%) 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 teal. For something softer, pull in its analogous neighbors on either side of the wheel.
Etymology
Latin simplus, single — sharing root with English single and simplex. As a color modifier, simple implies a neutral-and-uncomplicated-and-stripped-down quality where the hue carries the visual register of Shaker-and-Quaker-craft uncomplicated-and-honest hand-built-craft surface-finish. Sits at the neutral-and-stripped-down end of the grid, parallel to unassuming and modest in usage.
Element Pb, atomic number 82 — the soft, dense metal used since antiquity for plumbing (the Latin plumbum names both the metal and the trade), bullets, and white pigment despite its toxicity. The color refers to a polished lead surface: a soft, slightly muted gray-blue with the satin finish of a metal soft enough to scratch with a fingernail. Cooler than pewter, warmer than slate, with the toxic-historical weight of a metal whose use is now narrowly regulated.
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
This color has effectively no chroma (OKLCH C = 0.015) — 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
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.
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.