Serene Pluto Teal
Serene Pluto Teal (#27BCA0) is a true teal with a vibrant character. It holds its own as a focal accent, carrying visual weight without tipping into neon territory. Its HSL profile (169°, 66%, 45%) 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 red. For something softer, pull in its analogous neighbors on either side of the wheel.
Etymology
Latin serēnus, clear / unclouded. As a color modifier, serene implies a clear-and-untroubled quality where the hue carries the visual register of cloudless-bright-day atmospheric stability. Sits at the crisp-and-calm end of the grid, parallel to placid and untroubled in usage.
Latin Pluto, Roman-god-of-underworld-and-dwarf-planet. As a color modifier, pluto implies a Roman-god-of-underworld-and-Kuiper-belt-dwarf-planet quality, the visual register of Roman-Pluto-and-New-Horizons-flyby hand-Roman-god-of-underworld-and-Kuiper-belt-dwarf-planet Roman-Pluto-and-New-Horizons-flyby-and-Tombaugh-Regio pluto-and-Roman-god-of-underworld surfaces under Roman-Pluto-and-New-Horizons-flyby-and-Tombaugh-Regio 2015-flyby-and-heart-shaped-Tombaugh-Regio dwarf-planet-light. Sits at the modifier-and-zodiac end of the grid, parallel to neptune and saturn in usage.
Anas crecca, the small dabbling duck whose male in breeding plumage sports a chestnut head crossed by a glossy green-blue stripe. The color refers to that stripe — the iridescent panel just behind the eye: a saturated, slightly muted blue-green with the optical depth of structural color rather than pigment. Cooler than cypress, warmer than cerulean, with the ornithological specificity of a color named for one feather of one bird.
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.