Plaintive Fennel
Plaintive Fennel (#7A8473) 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 (95°, 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
Latin plangere, to lament — adjectival suffix -ive. As a color modifier, plaintive implies a hushed-and-sad-and-mourning quality where the hue carries the visual register of folk-song-and-lament sad-and-melancholic mood color-treatment. Sits at the hushed-and-melancholy end of the grid, parallel to mournful and wistful in usage.
Foeniculum vulgare, the Mediterranean herb whose feathery yellow-green fronds and bulb-like stem base are essential to Italian and French cooking. The color refers to fresh fennel fronds: a saturated, slightly cool feathery yellow-green with the matte finish of dissected leaves. Drier than dill.
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.