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Cool Pisces Turquoise

#48e2d7
Notes

Cool Pisces Turquoise (#48E2D7) 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 (176°, 73%, 58%) 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 red. For something softer, pull in its analogous neighbors on either side of the wheel.

HEX
#48e2d7
RGB
rgb(72, 226, 215)
HSL
hsl(176, 73%, 58%)
HWB
hwb(176 28% 11%)
OKLCH
oklch(83.1% 0.127 188.1)
HSV
hsv(176, 68%, 89%)
LAB
lab(82.20% -42.06 -6.34)
LCH
lch(82.20% 42.53 188.58)
CMYK
cmyk(68%, 0%, 5%, 11%)

Etymology

Cool
adjective

Old English cōl, of low temperature — used as a color modifier as the complement to warm. Cool gray, cool blue: the optical impression of a slight blue-green shift, even within otherwise warm or neutral hues. Sits across the crisp, hushed, pale, and neutral buckets.

Pisces
modifier

Latin pisces, fishes-of-the-zodiac. As a color modifier, pisces implies a two-fishes-and-water-sign-and-Jupiter-Neptune-ruled-mutable-water quality, the visual register of Hellenic-Pisces-and-Aphrodite-Eros-fishes hand-two-fishes-and-water-sign-and-Jupiter-Neptune-ruled-mutable-water Hellenic-Pisces-and-Aphrodite-Eros-fishes-and-Ichthys pisces-and-two-fishes-and-water-sign surfaces under Hellenic-Pisces-and-Aphrodite-Eros-fishes-and-Ichthys late-winter-and-February-and-March-into-April mutable-water-sign-light. Sits at the modifier-and-zodiac end of the grid, parallel to aquarius and aries in usage.

Turquoise
noun

The hydrated copper-aluminum phosphate mined in Persia and the American Southwest for thousands of years — the firuze of Iran, the chalchihuitl of Mesoamerica, the heart of Pueblo and Navajo silverwork. The color refers to a fine Sleeping Beauty turquoise from Arizona: a saturated, slightly green-shifted blue with the slight matrix of host-rock veining. Brighter than persian, lighter than cerulean.

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

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Harmonies

Accessibility

Color-vision simulation

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.

#48e2d7
Original
#d6d6d7
Protanopia
#bfc6d9
Deuteranopia
#00e8de
Tritanopia
#c0c0c0
Achromatopsia
WCAG contrast

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.

The quick brown foxSample body text at normal size. The wcag minimum for body contrast is 4.5:1 (AA) or 7:1 (AAA).
Failon White
1.60:1
The quick brown foxSample body text at normal size. The wcag minimum for body contrast is 4.5:1 (AA) or 7:1 (AAA).
AAAon Black
13.14:1

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