Heavy Mauve
Heavy Mauve (#855DC4) 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 (263°, 47%, 57%) 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.
Etymology
Old English hefig, weighty — cognate with heave. Used as a color modifier since at least the seventeenth century to indicate weight in saturation as much as value: heavy with pigment, heavy-bodied. In the engine's adjective grid, heavy sits alongside deep and plush in the dark-and-saturated quadrant. Closer to a fabric description than a pure value word.
The first synthetic aniline dye — an accidental product of William Perkin's 1856 attempt to synthesize quinine, which yielded a stable purple instead. Mauve (French for mallow) became the chemical-industry breakthrough that reshaped textile coloring. The color refers to a freshly mauve-dyed silk: a soft, slightly red-shifted pale purple with the slight luster of synthetic-dyed natural fiber. Lighter than violet, warmer than lilac, with the industrial-history weight of the pigment that founded modern chemistry.
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.