Frayed Juniper
Frayed Juniper (#758473) is a balanced neutral with a mono character. It's a grayscale value, at home in typography, dividers, and the structural layer beneath stronger colors. Its HSL profile (113°, 7%, 48%) places it in the muted band at a mid lightness. It works well as secondary text, borders, and placeholder states. A reliable middle gray that reads cleanly in either light or dark contexts. Pair it with almost any saturated accent. It's built to sit underneath or behind stronger colors without fighting them.
Etymology
Old French froyer, to rub — past-participle of fray. As a color modifier, frayed implies a hushed-and-edge-worn-and-aged quality, the hushed color of multi-decade cuffed-and-collared heavily-worn dress-attire textile-edges. Sits at the hushed-and-worn end of the grid, parallel to threadbare and tattered in usage.
The genus Juniperus, evergreen shrubs and trees whose fleshy berries — actually fleshy cones — flavor gin and Scandinavian sauerkraut. The color refers to the foliage of a mature juniper: a deep, slightly muted green with the matte finish of scale leaves and resinous waxes. Drabber than spruce, warmer than fir, with the alpine association of a plant that can grow at higher elevation than almost any other tree.
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.
This color sits well within the sRGB cube. P3 and sRGB share the gray axis and most desaturated tones, so a P3 display renders this identically to an sRGB display.