Strong Lough Sapphire
Strong Lough Sapphire (#3640B7) is a true blue 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 (235°, 54%, 46%) 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 yellow. For something softer, pull in its analogous neighbors on either side of the wheel.
Etymology
Old English strang, firm, vigorous — applied to color since the sixteenth century. Strong red, strong tea: a color at full strength is the maximum saturation the medium can produce. Sits at the saturated mid corner of the grid, parallel to bold in usage but slightly more focused on pigment density than on assertion.
Irish-and-Scottish loch via Old Irish loch, lake / sea-inlet. As a color modifier, lough implies a still-mountain-water quality, the visual register of Connemara-and-Lough-Erne Irish-Highland glacial-cirque-and-river-mouth still-and-mirror-smooth fresh-water surfaces under Western-Irish overcast light. Sits at the modifier-and-place end of the grid, parallel to mere and pond in usage.
An iron-and-titanium-bearing corundum — the same mineral as ruby, hardness 9 on the Mohs scale, mined for two millennia from Sri Lanka, Burma, Madagascar, and the Cashmere mines of British India. The color refers to a fine Kashmir-cut sapphire: a saturated, slightly violet-shifted deep blue with the gem's signature internal velvet — a quality of light scattering in the stone that faceted glass cannot replicate. Cooler than cobalt, deeper than azure.
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 is chromatic enough that authoring it as P3 native (instead of clamping to sRGB) gives a perceptibly more saturated render on wide-gamut displays — modern Macs, iPhones, iPads, and most recent OLED laptops.