Iridescent Pistache
Iridescent Pistache (#5CF7CB) is a true teal 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 (163°, 91%, 66%) places it in the highly saturated band at a mid lightness. Best used in small doses, like logos, CTAs, focus rings, or highlight text, where its saturation becomes a feature rather than noise. 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.
Etymology
Latin Īris, rainbow — adjectival suffix -escent, named for the Greek goddess of the rainbow. As a color modifier, iridescent implies a saturated-and-multi-spectrum-shifting quality, the bright color of peacock-feather-and-soap-bubble structurally-colored-and-thin-film optical-interference patterns. Sits at the bright-and-shifting end of the grid, parallel to prismatic and holographic in usage.
The French name for the pistachio nut — borrowed into English via the eighteenth-century pastry trade and persisting as a color name distinct from the food. Pistache refers to the soft, pale yellow-green of a French pistachio macaron rather than the deeper green of the raw nut: lighter than pistachio, cooler than celery, with the French-pâtisserie weight of a word more often seen on a Ladurée box than a plant catalog.
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.