Lessened Petrea
Lessened Petrea (#907C95) is a true violet 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 (288°, 11%, 54%) 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 green. For something softer, pull in its analogous neighbors on either side of the wheel.
Etymology
Old English lǣs, less — past-participle of lessen. As a color modifier, lessened implies a hushed-and-tone-reduced-and-mitigated quality where the hue carries the visual register of intentionally-reduced-and-eased ambient color treatment. Sits at the hushed-and-soft end of the grid, parallel to diminished and dampened in usage.
South American purple wreath vine (Petrea volubilis) — a Caribbean and Central-American twining woody vine cultivated worldwide for its long pendulous racemes of deep-violet sandpaper-textured flowers. Petrea color refers to a fully bloomed Petrea volubilis pendulous raceme: a saturated, slightly cool deep violet with the matte finish of fresh five-pointed star-shaped sandpaper-textured corollas. Named for Robert James Petre, an English botanical patron of the 18th century.
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.