Austere Spessartine
Austere Spessartine (#51290F) is a deep orange 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 (24°, 69%, 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 azure. For something softer, pull in its analogous neighbors on either side of the wheel.
Etymology
Latin austērus, harsh / bitter. As a color modifier, austere implies a deep-and-stripped-down formality, the dark plain-textile color of Bauhaus and Cistercian monastic interior aesthetic. Sits at the deep-and-formal end of the grid, parallel to stern and severe in tone.
A manganese-aluminum garnet — orange to red-orange in color, mined principally in Namibia, Mozambique, and California. Spessartine takes its name from the Spessart region of Germany. The color refers to a faceted Namibian spessartine: a saturated, slightly red orange with the gem's signature internal life. Brighter than hessonite.
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.