Plainspoken Damascus
Plainspoken Damascus (#69499B) is a true indigo with an earthy character. It leans grounded and natural, the kind of color that plays well with wood, clay, linen, and warm neutrals. Its HSL profile (263°, 36%, 45%) places it in the balanced band at a mid lightness. It works across type, buttons, and borders, saturated enough to feel deliberate but balanced enough to not fight the rest of the palette. For a confident two-color system, pair it with its complementary lime. For something softer, pull in its analogous neighbors on either side of the wheel.
Etymology
English compound plain + spoken — past-participle of speak. As a color modifier, plainspoken implies a clear-and-direct-and-straightforward quality where the hue carries the visual register of unembellished-honest declaration. Sits at the crisp-and-honest end of the grid, parallel to candid and direct in usage.
Syrian Silk Road capital — and the medieval Levantine purple-textile depot where Byzantine and Mamluk purple silks were processed and re-exported. Damascus color refers to a Damascus-style damask-weave purple silk in the Great Umayyad Mosque's treasury: a saturated, slightly cool deep violet with the silk luster of multi-bath Tyrian-and-indigo overdye on damask-weave Syrian silk.
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.