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Pleasant Verdant

#51c3a9
Notes

Pleasant Verdant (#51C3A9) is a true teal with a cool character. It leans cool, sitting on the blue, green, and violet side of the wheel. Quiet and dependable, a fit for product UI and data visualization. Its HSL profile (166°, 49%, 54%) places it in the balanced 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 red. For something softer, pull in its analogous neighbors on either side of the wheel.

HEX
#51c3a9
RGB
rgb(81, 195, 169)
HSL
hsl(166, 49%, 54%)
HWB
hwb(166 32% 24%)
OKLCH
oklch(74.5% 0.111 175.6)
P3
color(display-p3 0.4424 0.7550 0.6668)
HSV
hsv(166, 58%, 76%)
LAB
lab(71.99% -38.57 3.43)
LCH
lch(71.99% 38.73 174.92)
CMYK
cmyk(58%, 0%, 13%, 24%)

Etymology

Pleasant
adjective

From the French plaisant, pleasing — used as a color modifier since the fifteenth century for hues that read as agreeable, the kind of color that wears well over a long viewing without becoming demanding or fatiguing. Pleasant green, pleasant rose: moderate saturation combined with optical comfort. Sits at the crisp-bucket alongside easy and calm.

Verdant
noun

From the Latin viridis, green, through the French verdoyant. Verdant describes lushness — the saturated chlorophyll greenness of a thoroughly watered landscape after rain. The color refers to that idealized peak-summer green: a saturated, slightly cool green with the optical density of fully irrigated foliage. Deeper than meadow, cooler than basil, with the literary weight of a word that almost always appears in pastoral or paradisiacal contexts.

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 explore

Harmonies

Accessibility

Color-vision simulation

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.

#51c3a9
Original
#bcb8a8
Protanopia
#ababab
Deuteranopia
#00c5bb
Tritanopia
#a9a9a9
Achromatopsia
WCAG contrast

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.

The quick brown foxSample body text at normal size. The wcag minimum for body contrast is 4.5:1 (AA) or 7:1 (AAA).
Failon White
2.16:1
The quick brown foxSample body text at normal size. The wcag minimum for body contrast is 4.5:1 (AA) or 7:1 (AAA).
AAAon Black
9.73:1

Wide gamut

Display P3 representation

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.

sRGB hex
sRGB hex
##51C3A9
Display P3
Display P3
color(display-p3 0.4424 0.7550 0.6668)
P3 has subtle headroomOKLCH chroma 0.111

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.

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