Soaked Genji
Soaked Genji (#3D236B) is a deep indigo 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 (262°, 51%, 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 sūcian, to suck up liquid — past-participle of soak. As a color modifier, soaked implies a deep-saturation quality where the hue has reached fiber-saturation in dyed textile. Sits at the deep-and-saturated end of the grid, parallel to drenched and steeped in usage.
The eponymous nobleman of The Tale of Genji (Genji Monogatari, 1010 CE) by Murasaki Shikibu, whose silk-on-silk court robes were dyed in graduated layers of murasaki and aizome. Genji color refers to a layered Heian-period court robe in the kasane no irome tradition: a saturated, slightly cool deep blue-violet with the silk luster of multi-layer kasane dyeing.
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.