Demure Sappanwood
Demure Sappanwood (#927A80) is a true red with a warm character. It leans warm, pulling light toward red, orange, and yellow. Naturally inviting, it suits editorial and hospitality contexts. Its HSL profile (345°, 10%, 53%) 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 teal. For something softer, pull in its analogous neighbors on either side of the wheel.
Etymology
Old French meür, mature — sharing root with demur (to delay). As a color modifier, demure implies a hushed-and-modest-and-quiet quality, the hushed color of Edwardian-period finishing-school-and-debutante modest-and-quiet-and-restrained dress-attire textile-and-color choice. Sits at the hushed-and-restrained end of the grid, parallel to discreet and modest in usage.
Caesalpinia sappan, the Asian counterpart to brazilwood — used as a red dye source in Indian, Indonesian, and Japanese textile tradition. The color refers to sappanwood-dyed cotton: a saturated, slightly cool deep red with the warm tone of brazilein pigment. The Asian cousin of brazilwood.
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.