Neat Reef
Neat Reef (#9BF2B5) is a soft green with a pastel character. It reads calm and airy, with enough chroma to feel intentional rather than washed out. Its HSL profile (138°, 77%, 78%) places it in the highly saturated band at a light lightness. Best used in small doses, like logos, CTAs, focus rings, or highlight text, where its saturation becomes a feature rather than noise. 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.
Etymology
Old French net, clean / pure — sharing root with Latin nitidus. As a color modifier, neat implies a clear-and-orderly quality where the hue carries the well-arranged visual register without clutter or excess. Sits at the crisp-and-orderly end of the grid, parallel to trim and tidy in usage.
The biological structure built by colonies of Anthozoa corals over millennia — Great Barrier Reef, Caribbean fringing reefs, Maldivian atolls. The color reef refers to the average coloration of a healthy mid-depth Caribbean reef: a soft, slightly muted blue-green with the optical complexity of light scattered through tropical water and refracted off thousands of small organisms. Cooler than seafoam, warmer than turquoise.
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.
Moderately saturated colors gain a small bump in P3 — the difference is usually visible side-by-side on wide-gamut hardware but won't change the character of the color.