Clear Niche Topaz
Clear Niche Topaz (#88CCD1) 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 (184°, 44%, 68%) 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 red. For something softer, pull in its analogous neighbors on either side of the wheel.
Etymology
From the Latin clarus, bright, distinct — used as a color modifier since the medieval period for hues without haze or mixing. Clear blue sky, clear green water: the implication is moderate saturation combined with optical clarity. Sits at the crisp-bucket center alongside clean and true.
Italian nicchia, recess. As a color modifier, niche implies a wall-recess-for-statue-or-icon quality, the visual register of Roman-Catholic-and-Renaissance-niche hand-cut wall-recess-and-shell-shaped niche-for-statue-or-icon architectural surfaces under candle-and-niche-statue-and-icon devotional light. Sits at the modifier-and-architecture end of the grid, parallel to alcove and atrium in usage.
A fluorine aluminum silicate gem, hardness 8 on the Mohs scale, mined for centuries in Ouro Preto, Brazil. Imperial topaz is the prized variety: a warm, slightly pink-shifted gold-orange with the high refractive index of a quality cut stone. Cooler than amber, brighter than honey, with the gem's signature internal fire when held to light. Named for the island of Topazos in the Red Sea, though that source produced peridot instead.
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.
Wide gamut
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.
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.