Gloomy Borscht
Gloomy Borscht (#280C1E) is a deep magenta 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 (321°, 54%, 10%) places it in the balanced 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 green. For something softer, pull in its analogous neighbors on either side of the wheel.
Etymology
Middle English gloumen, to look glum — adjectival suffix -y. As a color modifier, gloomy implies a deep-and-cool-and-overcast quality, the dark cool-gray of Yorkshire-Moors and Scottish-Highlands late-autumn atmospheric-overcast sky. Sits at the deep-and-cool end of the grid, parallel to sullen and somber.
Eastern European beet-soup — particularly the Ukrainian and Polish bórshch and Russian borshch, made from Beta vulgaris roots and cabbage in a deep-magenta broth. Borscht color refers to a freshly served bowl of Ukrainian bórshch with a sour-cream swirl: a saturated, slightly cool deep magenta with the matte finish of betalain-pigmented beet broth. Slightly warmer than Belarusian barszcz.
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.
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.