Stygian Pinotage
Stygian Pinotage (#722056) is a deep magenta 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 (320°, 56%, 29%) 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 green. For something softer, pull in its analogous neighbors on either side of the wheel.
Etymology
From the Greek Styx, the river of the underworld — used as an adjective in English since the seventeenth century to mean infernally dark. Stygian is the literary register for absolute darkness, deeper than inky and warmer than vantablack. Almost always reaches for poetic weight rather than precise reflectance.
South African red-wine grape variety, a 1925 cross of Pinot Noir and Cinsaut by Stellenbosch University viticulturist Abraham Izak Perold. Pinotage color refers to a freshly poured South African Stellenbosch-region pinotage in a Bordeaux-style wine glass: a saturated, slightly cool deep magenta with the matte finish of anthocyanin-rich red-wine pigment. The grape's acetate-character gives it the banana-and-tar notes characteristic of South African reds.
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.