Darned Kohbai
Darned Kohbai (#957A86) is a true magenta 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 (333°, 11%, 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 darner, to mend — past-participle of darn. As a color modifier, darned implies a hushed-and-finely-stitched-and-restored quality, the hushed color of multi-decade Edwardian-period heavily-darned-and-stitched stocking-and-sock textile-finish. Sits at the hushed-and-worn end of the grid, parallel to mended and patched in usage.
Japanese 紅梅, red plum-blossom (Prunus mume var. kohbai) — the deep-pink-flowered cultivar of Japanese plum, a traditional New Year color in Heian-period kasane no irome layered silks. Kohbai color refers to a fully bloomed kohbai plum branch in February: a saturated, slightly cool deep magenta with the velvet finish of fresh plum-blossom petals against bare branches in early-spring snow.
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.