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Bold Starlight

#7b4dc9
Notes

Bold Starlight (#7B4DC9) is a true indigo 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 (262°, 53%, 55%) 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 lime. For something softer, pull in its analogous neighbors on either side of the wheel.

HEX
#7b4dc9
RGB
rgb(123, 77, 201)
HSL
hsl(262, 53%, 55%)
HWB
hwb(262 30% 21%)
OKLCH
oklch(53.6% 0.184 296.8)
HSV
hsv(262, 62%, 79%)
LAB
lab(43.85% 46.02 -57.78)
LCH
lch(43.85% 73.87 308.54)
CMYK
cmyk(39%, 62%, 0%, 21%)

Etymology

Bold
adjective

Old English beald, brave, courageous — a quality word that crossed over to color in the late seventeenth century. Bold describes a color that asserts itself: high saturation combined with mid lightness, where the hue presents itself without compromise. Sits at the center of the bold-bucket grid, near strong and rich. Closer to a presence word than a pigment word.

Starlight
noun

The integrated visible spectrum of the Milky Way's faint stars — about 500 times dimmer than full moonlight and richly blue-violet at high galactic-latitude viewing angles where dust extinction is minimized. Starlight color refers to the deep-blue night-sky background between the brightest stars on a moonless dark-site night: a saturated, slightly cool deep blue-violet with the optical complexity of integrated multi-stellar Rayleigh-scattered atmospheric light.

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

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Harmonies

Accessibility

Color-vision simulation

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.

#7b4dc9
Original
#0068cd
Protanopia
#0b66c6
Deuteranopia
#686884
Tritanopia
#606060
Achromatopsia
WCAG contrast

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.

The quick brown foxSample body text at normal size. The wcag minimum for body contrast is 4.5:1 (AA) or 7:1 (AAA).
AAon White
5.60:1
The quick brown foxSample body text at normal size. The wcag minimum for body contrast is 4.5:1 (AA) or 7:1 (AAA).
AA Largeon Black
3.75:1

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