Darned Ebony
Darned Ebony (#525E51) is a deep neutral with a mono character. It's a grayscale value, at home in typography, dividers, and the structural layer beneath stronger colors. Its HSL profile (115°, 7%, 34%) places it in the muted band at a dark lightness. It works as a background, hairline border, or text color in dark UI. Swap to true black when you need maximum contrast. Pair it with almost any saturated accent. It's built to sit underneath or behind stronger colors without fighting them.
Etymology
Old French darner, to mend — past-participle of darn. As a color modifier, darned implies a hushed-and-finely-stitched-and-restored quality, the hushed color of multi-decade Edwardian-period heavily-darned-and-stitched stocking-and-sock textile-finish. Sits at the hushed-and-worn end of the grid, parallel to mended and patched in usage.
The genus Diospyros — particularly D. ebenum of Sri Lanka and D. crassiflora of West Africa — whose dense black heartwood has been carved for ornament since the Egyptian Old Kingdom. The color refers to polished African blackwood: a deep, slightly warm matte black with the satin finish of close-grained hardwood. Warmer than obsidian, drier than pitch, with the carving weight of a wood that sinks in water and sharpens its own tools.
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.