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Buoyant Oasis

#8ba999
Notes

Buoyant Oasis (#8BA999) is a true teal 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 (148°, 15%, 60%) 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 magenta. For something softer, pull in its analogous neighbors on either side of the wheel.

HEX
#8ba999
RGB
rgb(139, 169, 153)
HSL
hsl(148, 15%, 60%)
HWB
hwb(148 55% 34%)
OKLCH
oklch(70.7% 0.040 161.9)
P3
color(display-p3 0.5683 0.6593 0.6040)
HSV
hsv(148, 18%, 66%)
LAB
lab(66.65% -13.60 4.84)
LCH
lch(66.65% 14.44 160.42)
CMYK
cmyk(18%, 0%, 9%, 34%)

Etymology

Buoyant
adjective

Old French boie, floating — adjectival suffix -ant. As a color modifier, buoyant implies a pale-and-floating-and-lifted quality where the hue carries the visual register of cork-and-balloon-rising-and-floating spatial-and-mood weightless-feel. Sits at the pale-and-soft end of the grid, parallel to floaty and floating in usage.

Oasis
noun

A fertile spot in a desert — particularly the date-palm oases of the Sahara and Arabian peninsula. Oasis color refers to the unifying blue-green of a Saharan oasis pool surrounded by date palms: a saturated, slightly cool deep blue-green with the optical clarity of mineral-spring water.

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.

#8ba999
Original
#a8a498
Protanopia
#a2a19a
Deuteranopia
#86a9a4
Tritanopia
#a1a1a1
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
2.55:1
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
8.23:1

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
##8BA999
Display P3
Display P3
color(display-p3 0.5683 0.6593 0.6040)
Inside sRGBOKLCH chroma 0.040

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.

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