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Levitated Halo

#9e9fbc
Notes

Levitated Halo (#9E9FBC) is a true blue 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 (238°, 18%, 68%) 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 yellow. For something softer, pull in its analogous neighbors on either side of the wheel.

HEX
#9e9fbc
RGB
rgb(158, 159, 188)
HSL
hsl(238, 18%, 68%)
HWB
hwb(238 62% 26%)
OKLCH
oklch(71.1% 0.042 283.7)
P3
color(display-p3 0.6203 0.6234 0.7280)
HSV
hsv(238, 16%, 74%)
LAB
lab(66.29% 5.65 -15.04)
LCH
lch(66.29% 16.06 290.58)
CMYK
cmyk(16%, 15%, 0%, 26%)

Etymology

Levitated
adjective

Latin levitās, lightness — past-participle of levitate. As a color modifier, levitated implies a pale-and-suspended-and-lifted quality where the hue carries the visual register of magic-trick-and-stage-illusion lifted-and-suspended-state spatial-condition. Sits at the pale-and-soft end of the grid, parallel to floating and buoyant in usage.

Halo
noun

Greek hálōs, threshing floor — adopted into Christian iconography as the circular disc behind the head of saintly figures, traditionally rendered in ultramarine lapis-and-gold-leaf in Greek-school and Russian-school icon panels. Halo color refers to a 14th-century Russian-school Theotokos icon's halo field: a saturated, slightly cool deep blue-violet with the matte finish of egg-tempera-bound ultramarine over gesso ground.

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.

#9e9fbc
Original
#98a2bd
Protanopia
#97a0bb
Deuteranopia
#98a4a8
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
2.58:1
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
8.14:1

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
##9E9FBC
Display P3
Display P3
color(display-p3 0.6203 0.6234 0.7280)
Inside sRGBOKLCH chroma 0.042

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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