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Tucked Marine

#81b5e2
Notes

Tucked Marine (#81B5E2) is a true azure 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 (208°, 63%, 70%) 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 orange. For something softer, pull in its analogous neighbors on either side of the wheel.

HEX
#81b5e2
RGB
rgb(129, 181, 226)
HSL
hsl(208, 63%, 70%)
HWB
hwb(208 51% 11%)
OKLCH
oklch(75.3% 0.085 245.4)
P3
color(display-p3 0.5493 0.7042 0.8702)
HSV
hsv(208, 43%, 89%)
LAB
lab(71.69% -5.49 -27.92)
LCH
lch(71.69% 28.45 258.87)
CMYK
cmyk(43%, 20%, 0%, 11%)

Etymology

Tucked
adjective

Old English tūcian, to torment / pull — past-participle of tuck. As a color modifier, tucked implies a clear-and-fitted-and-arranged quality where the hue carries the visual register of carefully-tucked-and-neatly-fitted shirt-into-trouser dress-attire. Sits at the crisp-and-finished end of the grid, parallel to trim and pressed in usage.

Marine
noun

From the Latin marinus, of the sea — borrowed via French as both noun and adjective. Marine blue refers to the deep working blue of merchant-ship paint and naval uniforms before navy took over the term in the twentieth century. The color is a saturated, slightly muted deep blue with the matte finish of a shipyard pigment. Cooler than cobalt, warmer than navy, with the maritime weight of a word shared by every Romance language.

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 explore

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.

#81b5e2
Original
#a3b5e4
Protanopia
#96abe1
Deuteranopia
#5bc0c4
Tritanopia
#adadad
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).
Failon White
2.18:1
The quick brown foxSample body text at normal size. The wcag minimum for body contrast is 4.5:1 (AA) or 7:1 (AAA).
AAAon Black
9.64:1

Wide gamut

Display P3 representation

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.

sRGB hex
sRGB hex
##81B5E2
Display P3
Display P3
color(display-p3 0.5493 0.7042 0.8702)
P3 has subtle headroomOKLCH chroma 0.085

Moderately saturated colors gain a small bump in P3 — the difference is usually visible side-by-side on wide-gamut hardware but won't change the character of the color.

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