Occluded Sindoor
Occluded Sindoor (#721F2C) 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 (351°, 57%, 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 teal. For something softer, pull in its analogous neighbors on either side of the wheel.
Etymology
Latin occludere, to close up — past-participle of occlude. As a color modifier, occluded implies a hue blocked-and-dimmed by an intervening physical barrier. Sits at the deep-and-obscured end of the grid, parallel to eclipsed and cloaked but more clinical in register.
The vermillion powder applied to the parted hair of married Hindu women — traditionally derived from cinnabar and turmeric, more recently from synthetic dyes. The color refers to fresh sindoor in a wedding ceremony: a saturated, slightly orange-shifted bright red with the powdery finish of mineral pigment. Brighter than vermillion, warmer than coral, with the social weight of a color tied to a single life-stage marker.
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.