Drained Starlight
Drained Starlight (#41219C) is a true indigo with a jewel character. It carries the deep, saturated richness of a gemstone. Authoritative and slightly formal, it works well for type and heavy UI elements. Its HSL profile (256°, 65%, 37%) 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 lime. For something softer, pull in its analogous neighbors on either side of the wheel.
Etymology
Old English drēahnian, to filter — past-participle of drain. As a color modifier, drained implies a deep-and-emptied-and-pallid quality where the hue's vital warmth has been removed. Sits at the deep-and-cool end of the grid, parallel to deathly with desaturation overtone.
The integrated visible spectrum of the Milky Way's faint stars — about 500 times dimmer than full moonlight and richly blue-violet at high galactic-latitude viewing angles where dust extinction is minimized. Starlight color refers to the deep-blue night-sky background between the brightest stars on a moonless dark-site night: a saturated, slightly cool deep blue-violet with the optical complexity of integrated multi-stellar Rayleigh-scattered atmospheric light.
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.