Drenched Bengal
Drenched Bengal (#321E70) is a deep indigo with a cool character. It leans cool, sitting on the blue, green, and violet side of the wheel. Quiet and dependable, a fit for product UI and data visualization. Its HSL profile (255°, 58%, 28%) 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 lime. For something softer, pull in its analogous neighbors on either side of the wheel.
Etymology
Old English drencan, to give to drink — past-participle of drench. As a color modifier, drenched implies a hue saturated to its visual maximum without dilution, the deep-and-soaked quality of cloth fully absorbed by dye. Sits at the deep-and-saturated end of the grid, where the color reads as fully bathed by pigment.
Historical Indian region (modern West Bengal and Bangladesh) — the colonial-era epicenter of Indigofera tinctoria cultivation, where the British East India Company forced peasant cultivators (ryots) into the nij indigo system. Bengal color refers to a Bengali handloom kantha embroidered cotton dyed in neel: a saturated, slightly cool deep blue-violet with the matte finish of fermentation-vat indigo on hand-loomed cotton.
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.