Melancholic Plumbago
Melancholic Plumbago (#465770) is a true azure 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 (216°, 23%, 36%) places it in the muted 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 amber. For something softer, pull in its analogous neighbors on either side of the wheel.
Etymology
Greek melan-cholē, black-bile — adjectival suffix -ic. As a color modifier, melancholic implies a hushed-and-sad-and-pensive quality where the hue carries the visual register of Dürer-Melencolia-I engraving-tradition pensive-and-thoughtful-mood color treatment. Sits at the hushed-and-melancholy end of the grid, parallel to wistful and pensive in usage.
Plumbago auriculata, the South African shrub whose pale-blue five-petaled flowers cluster on stems through summer. The Latin name traces to plumbum, lead, for the plant's purported ability to cure lead-related skin afflictions. The color refers to a fresh plumbago bloom: a soft, slightly violet-shifted very pale blue with the matte finish of a five-petaled flower. Lighter than larkspur, cooler than periwinkle.
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 sits well within the sRGB cube. P3 and sRGB share the gray axis and most desaturated tones, so a P3 display renders this identically to an sRGB display.