Charred Karakoram
Charred Karakoram (#43288B) is a true 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 (256°, 55%, 35%) 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
The past participle of char, to burn slightly — and a color word for surfaces that have been heat-blackened without fully consuming. Charred implies the carbon-blackened skin of grilled meat, fired wood, or smoke-darkened cathedral stone. Sits in the deep-and-near-black end of the engine's grid, slightly drier than inky and warmer than somber.
Central Asian mountain range straddling Pakistan, China, and India — home of K2 and the Hunza Valley's lapis-lazuli mines that supplied the Renaissance with ultramarine pigment. Karakoram color refers to an unworked Sar-e-Sang lapis-lazuli boulder freshly extracted from the Karakoram foothills: a saturated, slightly cool deep blue-violet with the matte finish of pyrite-flecked lazurite ore on rough fracture surface.
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.