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True Larimar

#56c7be
Notes

True Larimar (#56C7BE) is a true cyan 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 (175°, 50%, 56%) 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
#56c7be
RGB
rgb(86, 199, 190)
HSL
hsl(175, 50%, 56%)
HWB
hwb(175 34% 22%)
OKLCH
oklch(76.2% 0.103 188.1)
HSV
hsv(175, 57%, 78%)
LAB
lab(73.89% -34.11 -5.17)
LCH
lch(73.89% 34.50 188.63)
CMYK
cmyk(57%, 0%, 5%, 22%)

Etymology

True
adjective

Old English trēowe, faithful — used as a color modifier since the seventeenth century for hues that read as the canonical version of their family. True red, true blue: the saturation is full, the hue is neither shifted nor adulterated. Sits at the center of the bold and crisp buckets, marking the unequivocal middle of any chromatic family.

Larimar
noun

A blue variety of pectolite — a calcium-sodium silicate — found only in one mountain range in the Dominican Republic. Marketed as a gemstone since the 1970s and named after a Spanish word for the sea. The color refers to a polished larimar cabochon: a soft, slightly muted light blue with the cloudy translucency of pectolite. Lighter than aqua, warmer than glacier, with the gem-trade specificity of a stone that occurs in exactly one place on Earth.

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

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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.

#56c7be
Original
#bdbdbe
Protanopia
#abb0bf
Deuteranopia
#00cbc4
Tritanopia
#aeaeae
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
2.04:1
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
10.31:1

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