Caliginous Damson
Caliginous Damson (#3F1858) 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 (277°, 57%, 22%) 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
Latin cālīginōsus, misty / dark — derived from cālīgō (mist, gloom). As a color modifier, caliginous implies an obscured, dimmed, slightly-cool-shifted quality where the hue is veiled by darkness or atmospheric fog. Sits at the deep-and-veiled end of the grid, between murky and tenebrous in usage.
Prunus domestica subsp. insititia, the small dark plum of European orchards — too tart to eat fresh but unmatched for jam, gin-flavoring, and English plum pudding. Named for Damascus, the city through which it spread westward in antiquity. The color refers to a ripe damson on the tree: a deep, slightly red-shifted purple-black with the heavy bloom of waxy fruit surface. Deeper than plum, cooler than wine.
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.