Cimmerian Frangipani
Cimmerian Frangipani (#490C31) is a deep magenta with a jewel character. It carries the deep, saturated richness of a gemstone. Authoritative and slightly formal, it works well for type and heavy UI elements. Its HSL profile (324°, 72%, 17%) places it in the balanced 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 green. For something softer, pull in its analogous neighbors on either side of the wheel.
Etymology
From the Cimmerians of Homer's Odyssey — a legendary people who dwelled at the western edge of the world in perpetual darkness. As a color modifier, cimmerian implies a literary-poetic register for absolute darkness without sunlight. Sits at the deepest end of the grid, parallel to Stygian with classical literary connotations.
Caribbean and Polynesian Plumeria rubra — a tropical Apocynaceae tree cultivated worldwide for its highly fragrant five-petaled flowers in deep-magenta cultivars. The flowers are used in Hawaiian lei and Hindu garlands. Frangipani color refers to a freshly opened Plumeria rubra deep-magenta flower: a saturated, slightly cool deep magenta with the velvet finish of overlapping fleshy five-petaled corolla. Named for the Italian noble family that invented the perfume.
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.