Hadean Madder
Hadean Madder (#4E1D15) is a deep red with a warm character. It leans warm, pulling light toward red, orange, and yellow. Naturally inviting, it suits editorial and hospitality contexts. Its HSL profile (8°, 58%, 19%) 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 cyan. For something softer, pull in its analogous neighbors on either side of the wheel.
Etymology
Greek Hadean, of Hades — adjectival form of Hades. As a color modifier, hadean implies the deep cool-darkness of the classical-Greek underworld realms, with literary-poetic register. Sits at the deep-and-cool end of the grid, parallel to plutonian and Stygian in classical-mythological register.
Rubia tinctorum, the dyer's madder — the root pigment that fed European red textile production from antiquity until synthetic alizarin replaced it in 1869. Less brilliant than kermes, more lightfast than safflower, madder-dyed wool was the workhorse red of Persian carpets, British redcoats, and Turkish kilim. The color carries that history: a warm, slightly orange red with the matte finish of cloth rather than glaze.
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.