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Easy Wend Lagoon

#5a9eb6
Notes

Easy Wend Lagoon (#5A9EB6) 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 (196°, 39%, 53%) 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 orange. For something softer, pull in its analogous neighbors on either side of the wheel.

HEX
#5a9eb6
RGB
rgb(90, 158, 182)
HSL
hsl(196, 39%, 53%)
HWB
hwb(196 35% 29%)
OKLCH
oklch(66.4% 0.078 223.0)
P3
color(display-p3 0.4166 0.6130 0.7031)
HSV
hsv(196, 51%, 71%)
LAB
lab(61.66% -14.87 -19.09)
LCH
lch(61.66% 24.19 232.09)
CMYK
cmyk(51%, 13%, 0%, 29%)

Etymology

Easy
adjective

Old French aisié, comfortable, at rest — used as a color modifier since the eighteenth century for hues that read as visually undemanding. Easy beige, easy gray: moderate saturation combined with optical restfulness. Sits at the crisp-bucket center alongside calm and settled.

Wend
modifier

Old English wendan, to-turn-or-go. As a color modifier, wend implies a winding-and-turning-and-meandered quality, the visual register of pilgrim-path-and-river-wend hand-winding-and-turning-and-meandered pilgrim-path-and-river-and-Roman-road wended-and-winding-and-turning-and-meandered surfaces under pilgrim-path-and-river-and-Roman-road Camino-and-Pennine-Way-and-Kumano hilltop-pilgrim-light. Sits at the modifier-and-mood end of the grid, parallel to drift and roam in usage.

Lagoon
noun

A shallow body of saltwater partially or fully enclosed by a barrier — coral atoll lagoons in the Pacific, Venice's Laguna Veneta, the Florida Keys' backcountry. The color refers to the average reflectance of a calm tropical lagoon at midday: a saturated, slightly muted blue-green with the optical clarity of shallow water over white sand. Brighter than reef, cooler than aquamarine, with the postcard weight of a Pacific atoll seen from above.

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.

#5a9eb6
Original
#909bb7
Protanopia
#8390b6
Deuteranopia
#25a6a6
Tritanopia
#919191
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
3.00:1
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
7.00:1

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
##5A9EB6
Display P3
Display P3
color(display-p3 0.4166 0.6130 0.7031)
Inside sRGBOKLCH chroma 0.078

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.

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