Reticent Tarpaulin
Reticent Tarpaulin (#65595D) is a balanced neutral with a mono character. It's a grayscale value, at home in typography, dividers, and the structural layer beneath stronger colors. Its HSL profile (340°, 6%, 37%) places it in the muted band at a mid lightness. It works well as secondary text, borders, and placeholder states. A reliable middle gray that reads cleanly in either light or dark contexts. Pair it with almost any saturated accent. It's built to sit underneath or behind stronger colors without fighting them.
Etymology
Latin reticēns, silent — present-participle of reticēre. As a color modifier, reticent implies a neutral-and-quietly-withholding quality where the hue carries the visual register of Quaker-and-Puritan quietly-withholding-and-restrained color-decision. Sits at the neutral-and-quiet end of the grid, parallel to taciturn and laconic in usage.
English tar + palling, tar-covered cloth — the cool-mid-gray tar-impregnated canvas-tarp used in pre-modern English-and-American maritime-and-construction-industry weather-protection. Tarpaulin color refers to a freshly stretched Manila-canvas-tarpaulin over a Boston-Harbor Cape-Cod-fishery dockside fish-stack in raking sun: a balanced cool gray with the matte finish of coal-tar-impregnated hand-spun manila-canvas tarp.
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.
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.