Stygian Carmine
Stygian Carmine (#731A5C) is a deep magenta with a jewel character. It carries the deep, saturated richness of a gemstone. Authoritative and slightly formal, it works well for type and heavy UI elements. Its HSL profile (316°, 63%, 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 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.
The deep red-purple dye extracted from cochineal scale insects (Dactylopius coccus) — harvested in pre-Columbian Mexico and shipped to Europe by the Spanish empire as an export second only to silver. The color refers to fresh carmine pigment in solution: a saturated, slightly cool deep red-purple with the brilliance of a dye thirty times stronger than kermes. Cooler than crimson, warmer than wine, with the colonial-trade weight of a pigment that funded an empire.
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.