Hellish Petunia
Hellish Petunia (#552D82) is a deep indigo 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 (268°, 49%, 34%) 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 lime. For something softer, pull in its analogous neighbors on either side of the wheel.
Etymology
Old English helle, hell — adjectival suffix -ish. As a color modifier, hellish implies the deep-glowing-furnace-darkness of Dante-and-Bosch infernal-imagery, where heat and shadow combine in the painted-and-poetic Christian underworld. Sits at the deep-and-warm end of the grid, parallel to infernal and warmer than plutonian.
Petunia × atkinsiana, the modern garden hybrid bred from South American Petunia species in the nineteenth century — now the most-planted annual bedding flower in North America. The color refers to a deep purple petunia in summer container bloom: a saturated, slightly red-shifted deep purple with the satiny finish of trumpet-shaped flowers. Cooler than orchid, warmer than violet, with the bedding-plant weight of a genus bred for nearly endless color and continuous bloom.
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.