Floating Anchusa
Floating Anchusa (#A4D3CD) is a soft teal 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 (172°, 35%, 74%) places it in the balanced 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 red. For something softer, pull in its analogous neighbors on either side of the wheel.
Etymology
Old English flotian, to float — present-participle of float. As a color modifier, floating implies a pale-and-suspended-and-buoyant quality where the hue carries the visual register of cork-on-water-and-balloon-in-air lifted-and-suspended movement. Sits at the pale-and-soft end of the grid, parallel to buoyant and floaty in usage.
The genus Anchusa — Mediterranean borage-family perennials with saturated deep-blue flower spikes used in Renaissance European herbal medicine. The color refers to a fresh A. azurea (Italian bugloss) flower spike: a saturated, slightly cool deep blue with the matte finish of small five-petaled forget-me-not-style flowers.
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.