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Plainspoken Acai

#889cde
Notes

Plainspoken Acai (#889CDE) is a true blue 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 (226°, 57%, 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 amber. For something softer, pull in its analogous neighbors on either side of the wheel.

HEX
#889cde
RGB
rgb(136, 156, 222)
HSL
hsl(226, 57%, 70%)
HWB
hwb(226 53% 13%)
OKLCH
oklch(70.3% 0.100 270.8)
P3
color(display-p3 0.5483 0.6094 0.8507)
HSV
hsv(226, 39%, 87%)
LAB
lab(65.19% 9.20 -35.75)
LCH
lch(65.19% 36.91 284.43)
CMYK
cmyk(39%, 30%, 0%, 13%)

Etymology

Plainspoken
adjective

English compound plain + spoken — past-participle of speak. As a color modifier, plainspoken implies a clear-and-direct-and-straightforward quality where the hue carries the visual register of unembellished-honest declaration. Sits at the crisp-and-honest end of the grid, parallel to candid and direct in usage.

Acai
noun

Brazilian Portuguese for Euterpe oleracea — an Amazon-basin palm whose deep-purple-violet drupe was a quilombola and caboclo dietary staple before its 21st-century superfood commercialization. Acai color refers to a freshly pulped Euterpe oleracea drupe: a saturated, slightly cool deep blue-violet with the matte finish of anthocyanin-rich palm-fruit pulp. The Tupi-derived word entered English via Portuguese in the 1990s.

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.

#889cde
Original
#86a2e1
Protanopia
#7e9bdc
Deuteranopia
#6da9b3
Tritanopia
#9d9d9d
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
2.67:1
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
7.86:1

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
##889CDE
Display P3
Display P3
color(display-p3 0.5483 0.6094 0.8507)
P3 has subtle headroomOKLCH chroma 0.100

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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