Shaded Damascus
Shaded Damascus (#490F56) is a deep violet 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 (289°, 70%, 20%) 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
Old English sceadwian, to cover with shadow — past-participle of shade. As a color modifier, shaded implies a hue darkened by overhead-foliage-or-architectural-element occlusion in pre-modern garden-and-courtyard tradition. Sits at the deep-and-obscured end of the grid, parallel to shadowy but more architectural in connotation.
Syrian Silk Road capital — and the medieval Levantine purple-textile depot where Byzantine and Mamluk purple silks were processed and re-exported. Damascus color refers to a Damascus-style damask-weave purple silk in the Great Umayyad Mosque's treasury: a saturated, slightly cool deep violet with the silk luster of multi-bath Tyrian-and-indigo overdye on damask-weave Syrian silk.
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.