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Fine Beeswing

#a9a48c
Notes

Fine Beeswing (#A9A48C) is a true amber 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 (50°, 14%, 61%) 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 blue. For something softer, pull in its analogous neighbors on either side of the wheel.

HEX
#a9a48c
RGB
rgb(169, 164, 140)
HSL
hsl(50, 14%, 61%)
HWB
hwb(50 55% 34%)
OKLCH
oklch(71.6% 0.034 97.4)
P3
color(display-p3 0.6593 0.6438 0.5587)
HSV
hsv(50, 17%, 66%)
LAB
lab(67.19% -2.34 13.12)
LCH
lch(67.19% 13.33 100.12)
CMYK
cmyk(0%, 3%, 17%, 34%)

Etymology

Fine
adjective

Old French fin, fine / refined — sharing root with Latin fīnis (end). As a color modifier, fine implies a pale-and-precisely-detailed-and-refined quality where the hue carries the visual register of Sèvres-and-Meissen fine-bone-china porcelain finely-detailed surface. Sits at the pale-and-delicate end of the grid, parallel to delicate and filigree in usage.

Beeswing
noun

The thin, glassy crust that forms on the inside of a long-aged port or sherry bottle — fragments break loose like the wings of bees as the wine ages. The color refers to a beeswing-rich vintage port: a deep, slightly muted warm gold-brown with the optical complexity of long-cellar-aged fortified wine.

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.

#a9a48c
Original
#a9a28b
Protanopia
#aba48d
Deuteranopia
#aea09d
Tritanopia
#a3a3a3
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
2.51:1
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
8.38:1

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
##A9A48C
Display P3
Display P3
color(display-p3 0.6593 0.6438 0.5587)
Inside sRGBOKLCH chroma 0.034

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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