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Parchment Sugarcane

#a4b49b
Notes

Parchment Sugarcane (#A4B49B) is a true lime 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 (98°, 14%, 66%) 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 indigo. For something softer, pull in its analogous neighbors on either side of the wheel.

HEX
#a4b49b
RGB
rgb(164, 180, 155)
HSL
hsl(98, 14%, 66%)
HWB
hwb(98 61% 29%)
OKLCH
oklch(75.0% 0.039 134.2)
P3
color(display-p3 0.6548 0.7039 0.6162)
HSV
hsv(98, 14%, 71%)
LAB
lab(71.49% -10.23 10.89)
LCH
lch(71.49% 14.94 133.21)
CMYK
cmyk(9%, 0%, 14%, 29%)

Etymology

Parchment
adjective

Old French parchemin, parchment — adjectival usage of parchment. As a color modifier, parchment implies a pale-and-aged-and-translucent quality, the pale color of medieval-and-Renaissance hand-prepared calfskin-and-goatskin parchment-and-vellum manuscript-paper surface-finish. Sits at the pale-and-thin end of the grid, parallel to vellum and glassine in usage.

Sugarcane
noun

Saccharum officinarum, the tropical grass whose stems are pressed for the world's sugar — cultivated since prehistoric times in Papua New Guinea and now grown across the tropical belt. The color refers to fresh sugarcane stalks at harvest: a saturated, slightly cool yellow-green with the satin finish of segmented grass culm.

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.

#a4b49b
Original
#b6b09a
Protanopia
#b4af9c
Deuteranopia
#a4b2ad
Tritanopia
#afafaf
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
2.19:1
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
9.58:1

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
##A4B49B
Display P3
Display P3
color(display-p3 0.6548 0.7039 0.6162)
Inside sRGBOKLCH chroma 0.039

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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