Spick Catmint
Spick Catmint (#A9F0D5) is a soft teal with a pastel character. It reads calm and airy, with enough chroma to feel intentional rather than washed out. Its HSL profile (157°, 70%, 80%) 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 magenta. For something softer, pull in its analogous neighbors on either side of the wheel.
Etymology
Old Norse spik-spakr, spike-new — sharing root with spic-and-span. As a color modifier, spick implies a clear-and-newly-cleaned quality where the hue carries the just-polished visual register of fresh-painted-and-fresh-cleaned surfaces. Sits at the crisp-and-clean end of the grid, parallel to spotless and pristine in usage.
The genus Nepeta — particularly N. mussinii (catmint), the cottage-garden perennial with silver-green foliage and lavender-blue flower spikes. The color refers to a fresh catmint clump in May: a soft, slightly cool gray-green with the matte finish of small mint-family leaves. Cooler than santolina.
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.
Moderately saturated colors gain a small bump in P3 — the difference is usually visible side-by-side on wide-gamut hardware but won't change the character of the color.