True Heliconia
True Heliconia (#7D1D63) 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°, 62%, 30%) 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
Old English trēowe, faithful — used as a color modifier since the seventeenth century for hues that read as the canonical version of their family. True red, true blue: the saturation is full, the hue is neither shifted nor adulterated. Sits at the center of the bold and crisp buckets, marking the unequivocal middle of any chromatic family.
Central- and South-American lobster-claw (Heliconia rostrata) — a tropical Heliconiaceae perennial cultivated worldwide for its pendulous rostrate-bracted inflorescences in deep-magenta-and-yellow. Heliconia color refers to a fully developed Heliconia rostrata pendulous inflorescence: a saturated, slightly cool deep magenta with the matte finish of waxy bract-clusters. Named for Mount Helicon, the muses' Greek-mythological mountain.
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.