Brooding Merlot
Brooding Merlot (#521A16) 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 (4°, 58%, 20%) 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
The adjectival use of brood in the sense of to dwell on — a gerund-as-modifier that describes mood more than reflectance. Used as a color word principally in art criticism since the late nineteenth century: brooding sky, brooding portrait. In the engine's adjective grid, brooding sits in the dark-and-quiet end where the hue is present but reads as withholding rather than presenting itself.
A Bordeaux red-wine grape — softer, fruitier, earlier-ripening than Cabernet Sauvignon, and the most-planted red grape in France. The color refers to a young Merlot from Saint-Émilion in a glass: a saturated, slightly cool deep red with the optical clarity of mid-tannin wine. Lighter than Cabernet, warmer than Pinot.
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.