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Buttoned Baldr Teal

#6cbdbe
Notes

Buttoned Baldr Teal (#6CBDBE) is a true cyan 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 (181°, 39%, 58%) 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 red. For something softer, pull in its analogous neighbors on either side of the wheel.

HEX
#6cbdbe
RGB
rgb(108, 189, 190)
HSL
hsl(181, 39%, 58%)
HWB
hwb(181 42% 25%)
OKLCH
oklch(74.7% 0.080 196.6)
P3
color(display-p3 0.4996 0.7334 0.7408)
HSV
hsv(181, 43%, 75%)
LAB
lab(71.76% -24.47 -8.25)
LCH
lch(71.76% 25.82 198.64)
CMYK
cmyk(43%, 1%, 0%, 25%)

Etymology

Buttoned
adjective

Old French bouton, button — past-participle of button. As a color modifier, buttoned implies a clear-and-fastened-and-formal quality, the crisp color of Edwardian-period formal-attire fully-fastened-and-formally-dressed gentleman's-attire. Sits at the crisp-and-finished end of the grid, parallel to trim and pressed in usage.

Baldr
modifier

Old Norse Baldr, fair-and-shining-god-of-light. As a color modifier, baldr implies a fair-and-shining-god-of-light quality, the visual register of Norse-Baldr-and-Breidablik-hall hand-fair-and-shining-god-of-light Norse-Baldr-and-Breidablik-hall-and-mistletoe-fall baldr-and-fair-and-shining-god-of-light surfaces under Norse-Baldr-and-Breidablik-hall-and-mistletoe-fall Asgard-pantheon-and-Hel-descent fair-radiance-light. Sits at the modifier-and-myth end of the grid, parallel to odin and freya in usage.

Teal
noun

Anas crecca, the small dabbling duck whose male in breeding plumage sports a chestnut head crossed by a glossy green-blue stripe. The color refers to that stripe — the iridescent panel just behind the eye: a saturated, slightly muted blue-green with the optical depth of structural color rather than pigment. Cooler than cypress, warmer than cerulean, with the ornithological specificity of a color named for one feather of one bird.

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 explore

Harmonies

Accessibility

Color-vision simulation

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.

#6cbdbe
Original
#b3b6be
Protanopia
#a5abbf
Deuteranopia
#44c2bd
Tritanopia
#acacac
Achromatopsia
WCAG contrast

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.

The quick brown foxSample body text at normal size. The wcag minimum for body contrast is 4.5:1 (AA) or 7:1 (AAA).
Failon White
2.17:1
The quick brown foxSample body text at normal size. The wcag minimum for body contrast is 4.5:1 (AA) or 7:1 (AAA).
AAAon Black
9.66:1

Wide gamut

Display P3 representation

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.

sRGB hex
sRGB hex
##6CBDBE
Display P3
Display P3
color(display-p3 0.4996 0.7334 0.7408)
Inside sRGBOKLCH chroma 0.080

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.

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