colors
Back to gallery

Pleasant Jetty Ocean

#85b9b7
Notes

Pleasant Jetty Ocean (#85B9B7) is a true cyan 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 (178°, 27%, 62%) places it in the muted 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 red. For something softer, pull in its analogous neighbors on either side of the wheel.

HEX
#85b9b7
RGB
rgb(133, 185, 183)
HSL
hsl(178, 27%, 62%)
HWB
hwb(178 52% 27%)
OKLCH
oklch(74.9% 0.055 193.1)
P3
color(display-p3 0.5648 0.7199 0.7154)
HSV
hsv(178, 28%, 73%)
LAB
lab(71.62% -17.38 -4.49)
LCH
lch(71.62% 17.95 194.47)
CMYK
cmyk(28%, 0%, 1%, 27%)

Etymology

Pleasant
adjective

From the French plaisant, pleasing — used as a color modifier since the fifteenth century for hues that read as agreeable, the kind of color that wears well over a long viewing without becoming demanding or fatiguing. Pleasant green, pleasant rose: moderate saturation combined with optical comfort. Sits at the crisp-bucket alongside easy and calm.

Jetty
modifier

Old French jetée, thrown-out / projection. As a color modifier, jetty implies a stone-or-timber-projection quality, the visual register of Cornish-fishing-village small stone-and-timber-built sea-jetty fishing-and-boat-loading surfaces under Cornish-fishing-village granite-and-cobble harbor working-light. Sits at the modifier-and-place end of the grid, parallel to pier and quay in usage.

Ocean
noun

The body of saltwater that covers seventy percent of Earth's surface — a single connected mass divided by convention into Atlantic, Pacific, Indian, Southern, and Arctic. The color refers to the average reflectance of mid-depth temperate ocean: a saturated, slightly green-shifted deep blue with the optical depth of a body of water that absorbs all light below the photic zone. Deeper than mediterranean, cooler than peacock.

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.

#85b9b7
Original
#b3b4b7
Protanopia
#a9acb8
Deuteranopia
#73bcb8
Tritanopia
#aeaeae
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
9.62:1

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
##85B9B7
Display P3
Display P3
color(display-p3 0.5648 0.7199 0.7154)
Inside sRGBOKLCH chroma 0.055

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.

Related Colors

Canvas