Quiet Blink Teal
Quiet Blink Teal (#39B8A8) is a true teal 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 (172°, 53%, 47%) 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 quietus, at rest — used as a color modifier since the medieval period for hues that read as restrained. Quiet pink, quiet blue: low saturation combined with optical calmness. Sits across the crisp and hushed buckets where the color is present but doesn't ask for attention.
Middle Dutch blinken, to-shine-or-twinkle. As a color modifier, blink implies a quick-and-twinkling-and-on-off quality, the visual register of lighthouse-beam-and-firefly-blink hand-quick-and-twinkling-and-on-off lighthouse-beam-and-firefly-and-Morse-lamp blinked-and-quick-and-twinkling surfaces under lighthouse-beam-and-firefly-and-Morse-lamp coastal-headland-and-summer-meadow rotating-and-pulsed-light. Sits at the modifier-and-mood end of the grid, parallel to wink and glint 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.
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.
Moderately saturated colors gain a small bump in P3 — the difference is usually visible side-by-side on wide-gamut hardware but won't change the character of the color.