Tenebrous Kikyo
Tenebrous Kikyo (#250533) 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 (282°, 82%, 11%) 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
Latin tenebrōsus, full of darkness — derived from tenebrae (the deepening shadows of evening prayer service). As a color modifier, tenebrous implies a literary-poetic register for deep-shadowed darkness, where the hue is overwhelmed by ambient gloom. Sits at the deep-and-cool end of the grid, near Stygian but with painterly-baroque connotations.
Japanese 桔梗, the balloon flower (Platycodon grandiflorus) — a wild perennial of Japanese mountainsides whose star-shaped corolla unfurls from an inflated bud. The flower is one of the Seven Autumn Flowers of classical waka poetry. Kikyo color refers to a fully unfurled Platycodon grandiflorus corolla: a saturated, slightly cool deep violet with the velvet finish of fresh balloon-flower petals.
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.