Midnight Walnut
Midnight Walnut (#5D3D01) is a deep amber 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 (39°, 98%, 18%) places it in the highly saturated band at a dark 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 azure. For something softer, pull in its analogous neighbors on either side of the wheel.
Etymology
The color of the sky at midnight on a clear, moonless night, far from city lights — almost black, but with a slight blue cast where star-scattered light reaches the eye. The color refers to that exact moment: a very deep, slightly violet-shifted near-black blue with the optical depth of a sky stripped of every direct light source. Deeper than navy, warmer than ink, with the temporal weight of a name that is a precise hour as well as a color.
Juglans regia, the Persian walnut — a tree cultivated for nuts and timber throughout the ancient Mediterranean. The color refers to finished walnut wood: a warm, slightly purple-brown with the deep grain of a hardwood prized for furniture and gun stocks. The pigment of the wood is identical to the dye made from the outer husks of the nuts, which stain anything they touch.
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.