Cultured Tarmac
Cultured Tarmac (#473930) is a deep orange 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 (23°, 19%, 23%) places it in the muted 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 azure. For something softer, pull in its analogous neighbors on either side of the wheel.
Etymology
Latin cultūra, cultivation — past-participle of culture. As a color modifier, cultured implies a neutral-and-cultivated-and-educated quality, the neutral color of Edwardian-and-Belle-Époque cultivated-and-educated-and-refined elegant-and-cultivated interior-decoration-and-dress-attire coordinated-color tone. Sits at the neutral-and-cultivated end of the grid, parallel to refined and polished in usage.
A specific type of asphalt paving — tar macadam, named for John Loudon McAdam's 1820s road technique combined with tar binder. Tarmac in British English now means airfield runway generally. The color refers to a fresh runway surface: a soft, slightly muted dark gray with the matte finish of stone-and-bitumen paving. Lighter than asphalt, warmer than slate, with the aviation-and-road weight of an infrastructure word that traveled across the Atlantic.
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.