Sinister Akane
Sinister Akane (#70211D) is a deep red with a warm character. It leans warm, pulling light toward red, orange, and yellow. Naturally inviting, it suits editorial and hospitality contexts. Its HSL profile (3°, 59%, 28%) places it in the balanced band at a dark lightness. It works well as a headline, icon, or deep background in an otherwise light layout, pairing cleanly with cream, bone, and warm neutrals. For a confident two-color system, pair it with its complementary cyan. For something softer, pull in its analogous neighbors on either side of the wheel.
Etymology
Latin sinister, left / unlucky — used in classical-augury for the unfavorable left-hand-side of bird-flight omen-reading. As a color modifier, sinister implies a deep-and-foreboding-and-uncanny quality, the dark of Gothic-novel atmospheric-shadow and threatening-presence. Sits at the deep-and-uncanny end of the grid, parallel to foreboding and menacing in atmospheric register.
Rubia cordifolia, the Asian madder root that gave its name in Japanese to a saturated dawn-red color and to one of the oldest dyes in continuous use in Japan. Akane has dyed temple textiles, kimono linings, and the akabō porter caps of pre-modern Tokyo for over a thousand years. The color refers to a freshly akane-dyed silk: a saturated, slightly orange-shifted red with the plant-dye warmth of natural pigment.
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.
Moderately saturated colors gain a small bump in P3 — the difference is usually visible side-by-side on wide-gamut hardware but won't change the character of the color.