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True Bermellón

#a73227
Notes

True Bermellón (#A73227) is a true red with a warm character. It leans warm, pulling light toward red, orange, and yellow. Naturally inviting, it suits editorial and hospitality contexts. Its HSL profile (5°, 62%, 40%) places it in the balanced 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 cyan. For something softer, pull in its analogous neighbors on either side of the wheel.

HEX
#a73227
RGB
rgb(167, 50, 39)
HSL
hsl(5, 62%, 40%)
HWB
hwb(5 15% 35%)
OKLCH
oklch(49.2% 0.155 29.2)
HSV
hsv(5, 77%, 65%)
LAB
lab(38.98% 47.18 34.01)
LCH
lch(38.98% 58.16 35.79)
CMYK
cmyk(0%, 70%, 77%, 35%)

Etymology

True
adjective

Old English trēowe, faithful — used as a color modifier since the seventeenth century for hues that read as the canonical version of their family. True red, true blue: the saturation is full, the hue is neither shifted nor adulterated. Sits at the center of the bold and crisp buckets, marking the unequivocal middle of any chromatic family.

Bermellón
noun

Spanish for vermillion — the cinnabar-derived pigment used in the painted altarpieces of Castilian and Andalusian baroque. The color refers to a freshly mixed bermellón in a Sevillian polychrome workshop: a saturated, slightly orange red with the high gloss of pigment in oil. The Spanish equivalent of shu — different language, same mineral.

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

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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.

#a73227
Original
#544c25
Protanopia
#716523
Deuteranopia
#b80830
Tritanopia
#4a4a4a
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).
AAon White
6.71:1
The quick brown foxSample body text at normal size. The wcag minimum for body contrast is 4.5:1 (AA) or 7:1 (AAA).
AA Largeon Black
3.13:1

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