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Poised Starlight

#6d81e9
Notes

Poised Starlight (#6D81E9) is a true blue 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 (230°, 74%, 67%) 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 amber. For something softer, pull in its analogous neighbors on either side of the wheel.

HEX
#6d81e9
RGB
rgb(109, 129, 233)
HSL
hsl(230, 74%, 67%)
HWB
hwb(230 43% 9%)
OKLCH
oklch(63.7% 0.157 273.0)
HSV
hsv(230, 53%, 91%)
LAB
lab(56.91% 21.79 -55.02)
LCH
lch(56.91% 59.18 291.60)
CMYK
cmyk(53%, 45%, 0%, 9%)

Etymology

Poised
adjective

Old French peser, to weigh — past-participle of poise. As a color modifier, poised implies a saturated-and-balanced-and-confident quality where the hue holds its position with elegant equilibrium. Sits at the bold-and-confident end of the grid, parallel to centered and composed.

Starlight
noun

The integrated visible spectrum of the Milky Way's faint stars — about 500 times dimmer than full moonlight and richly blue-violet at high galactic-latitude viewing angles where dust extinction is minimized. Starlight color refers to the deep-blue night-sky background between the brightest stars on a moonless dark-site night: a saturated, slightly cool deep blue-violet with the optical complexity of integrated multi-stellar Rayleigh-scattered atmospheric light.

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

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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.

#6d81e9
Original
#538eed
Protanopia
#4584e7
Deuteranopia
#3098aa
Tritanopia
#848484
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).
AA Largeon White
3.52:1
The quick brown foxSample body text at normal size. The wcag minimum for body contrast is 4.5:1 (AA) or 7:1 (AAA).
AAon Black
5.97:1

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