Weathered Charoite
Weathered Charoite (#505773) is a true blue 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 (228°, 18%, 38%) places it in the muted 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 amber. For something softer, pull in its analogous neighbors on either side of the wheel.
Etymology
The past participle of weather, to expose to the elements — used as a color modifier since the eighteenth century for hues that have been altered by sun, wind, and water. Weathered wood, weathered tin: low saturation combined with the optical irregularity of exposed surfaces. Sits at the hushed-bucket alongside worn and aged.
Russian violet-banded mineral mined exclusively along the Chara River in Yakutia, eastern Siberia, since the 1940s. Charoite color refers to a polished Yakutian charoite cabochon: a saturated, slightly cool deep blue-violet with the silky chatoyant finish of fibrous strontium-potassium-calcium silicate. The only deep-violet mineral mined commercially in Russia, valued for its complex banded patterning.
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.