Healthful Pitted Peacock
Healthful Pitted Peacock (#42DCEB) is a true cyan with a vibrant character. It holds its own as a focal accent, carrying visual weight without tipping into neon territory. Its HSL profile (185°, 81%, 59%) places it in the highly saturated band at a mid lightness. Best used in small doses, like logos, CTAs, focus rings, or highlight text, where its saturation becomes a feature rather than noise. 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
Old English hǣlth, health — adjectival suffix -ful. As a color modifier, healthful implies a clear-and-vital-and-wholesome quality where the hue carries the visual register of fresh-air-and-sunlight outdoor health-promoting environment. Sits at the crisp-and-wholesome end of the grid, parallel to salubrious and wholesome in usage.
Old English pyt, pit / hole. As a color modifier, pitted implies a small-hole-and-mark-pattern quality, the visual register of worn-and-pitted-stone-and-leather hand-worn-and-pitted stone-and-leather-and-metal worn-and-pitted-mark-and-hole surfaces under worn-and-pitted-stone-and-leather aged light. Sits at the modifier-and-texture end of the grid, parallel to mossed and limed in usage.
Pavo cristatus, the Indian peafowl whose male displays the most elaborate sexual ornament in birds — a fan of two-meter eyespotted tail feathers in iridescent blue-green. The color is structural, not pigmented: created by interference patterns in the feather barbules. Peacock blue refers to the dominant body color: a saturated, slightly muted teal-blue with the optical depth of structural color. Cooler than persian, warmer than sapphire.
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.