Sanitary Sunflower
Sanitary Sunflower (#5B5C12) is a deep yellow with a jewel character. It carries the deep, saturated richness of a gemstone. Authoritative and slightly formal, it works well for type and heavy UI elements. Its HSL profile (61°, 67%, 22%) 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 blue. For something softer, pull in its analogous neighbors on either side of the wheel.
Etymology
Latin sānitās, health — adjectival suffix -ary. As a color modifier, sanitary implies a clear-and-clean-and-medical quality, the crisp color of Bauhaus-and-Modern clinical-and-hospital interior-architecture white-tile-and-stainless-steel surfaces. Sits at the crisp-and-clean end of the grid, parallel to hygienic and sterile in usage.
Helianthus annuus, the North American annual whose ray florets follow the sun across the sky during the early bud stage and then settle east-facing once mature. The color refers to a fully open sunflower's ray petals: a saturated, slightly orange-shifted yellow with the satiny finish of bee-pollinated bloom. Van Gogh's signature yellow, the unifying color of a Tuscan field, the cover crop of a Ukrainian summer.
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.