Pitchy Petunia
Pitchy Petunia (#650E4D) is a deep magenta 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 (317°, 76%, 23%) 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 green. For something softer, pull in its analogous neighbors on either side of the wheel.
Etymology
Old English pic, pitch — adjectival suffix -y. As a color modifier, pitchy implies the deep-glossy-black quality of bitumen-and-pine-pitch viscous-residue surfaces, particularly the Norse-and-Viking longship-pine-tar caulking. Sits at the deepest-warm end of the grid, parallel to tarry and warmer than Stygian.
Petunia × atkinsiana, the modern garden hybrid bred from South American Petunia species in the nineteenth century — now the most-planted annual bedding flower in North America. The color refers to a deep purple petunia in summer container bloom: a saturated, slightly red-shifted deep purple with the satiny finish of trumpet-shaped flowers. Cooler than orchid, warmer than violet, with the bedding-plant weight of a genus bred for nearly endless color and continuous bloom.
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.