Pressing Tyrian
Pressing Tyrian (#4C2248) is a deep violet 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 (306°, 38%, 22%) 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
Latin pressāre, to press repeatedly — present-participle of press. As a color modifier, pressing implies a deep-and-imposing-and-weighty quality where the hue exerts visual force on its substrate. Sits at the deep-and-weighty end of the grid, parallel to crushing with insistent register.
Historical Phoenician Tyrian purple (purpura) — derived from the Bolinus brandaris and Hexaplex trunculus sea-snail hypobranchial-gland secretion, processed at industrial scale on the Lebanese coast from 1500 BCE to 1453 CE. Tyrian color refers to a freshly Tyrian-purple-dyed Roman toga picta: a saturated, slightly cool deep violet with the matte finish of multi-bath Murex shellfish-dye on woolen toga cloth.
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.