Dusty Yamaai
Dusty Yamaai (#A1A9C8) is a soft 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 (228°, 26%, 71%) places it in the muted band at a light lightness. It works as a background wash, large-area fill, or soft illustration tone. Add a darker ink of the same hue when you need type over it. For a confident two-color system, pair it with its complementary amber. For something softer, pull in its analogous neighbors on either side of the wheel.
Etymology
An adjectival form of dust — used as a color modifier since the seventeenth century for hues that read as covered or muted by fine particulate. Dusty pink, dusty lavender: low saturation combined with optical mattness. Sits at the pale-bucket alongside misty and chalky.
Japanese mountain indigo, Mercurialis leiocarpa — a wild herb used for dyeing in the Heian period (794–1185) before cultivated aizome indigo supplanted it. Yamaai color refers to a freshly yamaai-dyed silk: a saturated, slightly cool deep blue-violet with the matte finish of mineral-mordanted natural dye. The plant is the only naturally occurring indican-type indigo precursor in Japan.
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.