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Heavy Moor Tanzanite

#5b395b
Notes

Heavy Moor Tanzanite (#5B395B) is a deep violet 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 (300°, 23%, 29%) places it in the muted 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 green. For something softer, pull in its analogous neighbors on either side of the wheel.

HEX
#5b395b
RGB
rgb(91, 57, 91)
HSL
hsl(300, 23%, 29%)
HWB
hwb(300 22% 64%)
OKLCH
oklch(39.8% 0.071 326.8)
P3
color(display-p3 0.3377 0.2294 0.3492)
HSV
hsv(300, 37%, 36%)
LAB
lab(29.17% 21.31 -14.21)
LCH
lch(29.17% 25.61 326.30)
CMYK
cmyk(0%, 37%, 0%, 64%)

Etymology

Heavy
adjective

Old English hefig, weighty — cognate with heave. Used as a color modifier since at least the seventeenth century to indicate weight in saturation as much as value: heavy with pigment, heavy-bodied. In the engine's adjective grid, heavy sits alongside deep and plush in the dark-and-saturated quadrant. Closer to a fabric description than a pure value word.

Moor
modifier

Old English mōr, waste / marshland. As a color modifier, moor implies a heather-covered-upland quality, the visual register of Yorkshire-and-Scottish-Moors heather-and-bracken-covered peat-bog-and-grouse-shooting upland surfaces under late-summer purple-heather Yorkshire-and-Highland atmospheric light. Sits at the modifier-and-place end of the grid, parallel to bog and wold in usage.

Tanzanite
noun

A blue-violet variety of zoisite — discovered in 1967 in a single small area of northern Tanzania near Mount Kilimanjaro and marketed by Tiffany & Co. shortly after. The color refers to a faceted tanzanite cut to maximize its strong pleochroism: a saturated, slightly violet-shifted deep blue-purple with the gem's signature internal life. Cooler than amethyst, warmer than iolite, 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

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.

#5b395b
Original
#37425c
Protanopia
#3f465a
Deuteranopia
#5d3c46
Tritanopia
#434343
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).
AAAon White
9.63:1
The quick brown foxSample body text at normal size. The wcag minimum for body contrast is 4.5:1 (AA) or 7:1 (AAA).
Failon Black
2.18:1

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
##5B395B
Display P3
Display P3
color(display-p3 0.3377 0.2294 0.3492)
Inside sRGBOKLCH chroma 0.071

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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