Sterile Verdant
Sterile Verdant (#77E0A9) is a true teal 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 (149°, 63%, 67%) places it in the balanced band at a mid lightness. It works across type, buttons, and borders, saturated enough to feel deliberate but balanced enough to not fight the rest of the palette. For a confident two-color system, pair it with its complementary magenta. For something softer, pull in its analogous neighbors on either side of the wheel.
Etymology
Latin sterilis, barren / not-fertile — sharing root with Greek steiros (barren). As a color modifier, sterile implies a clear-and-medical-clean-and-stripped quality, the crisp color of operating-theater surgical-environment white-and-stainless-steel surfaces. Sits at the crisp-and-clean end of the grid, parallel to sanitary and hygienic in usage.
From the Latin viridis, green, through the French verdoyant. Verdant describes lushness — the saturated chlorophyll greenness of a thoroughly watered landscape after rain. The color refers to that idealized peak-summer green: a saturated, slightly cool green with the optical density of fully irrigated foliage. Deeper than meadow, cooler than basil, with the literary weight of a word that almost always appears in pastoral or paradisiacal contexts.
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.