colors
Back to gallery

Folksy Batiste

#aa9ca0
Notes

Folksy Batiste (#AA9CA0) 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 (343°, 8%, 64%) 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 teal. For something softer, pull in its analogous neighbors on either side of the wheel.

HEX
#aa9ca0
RGB
rgb(170, 156, 160)
HSL
hsl(343, 8%, 64%)
HWB
hwb(343 61% 33%)
OKLCH
oklch(70.6% 0.017 358.3)
P3
color(display-p3 0.6573 0.6137 0.6270)
HSV
hsv(343, 8%, 67%)
LAB
lab(65.64% 5.83 -0.23)
LCH
lch(65.64% 5.84 357.73)
CMYK
cmyk(0%, 8%, 6%, 33%)

Etymology

Folksy
adjective

English folk — adjectival suffix -sy. As a color modifier, folksy implies a neutral-and-down-home-and-traditional quality, the neutral color of American-Folk-Art and English-and-Welsh-cottage hand-spun-and-hand-woven traditional-craft textile-and-decorative surface. Sits at the neutral-and-traditional end of the grid, parallel to homespun and homey in usage.

Batiste
noun

French batiste, Cambrai-fine-linen — the pale-cool-pale-gray-and-white fine-linen-cloth of pre-modern French-and-Belgian-textile manufacture, named after the 13th-century weaver Baptiste de Cambrai. Batiste color refers to a freshly hand-loomed Cambrai-period batiste in raking light: a pale cool gray with the silky finish of fine-spun-and-hand-loomed flax-linen with the characteristic batiste-pattern smooth-and-fine-weave.

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.

#aa9ca0
Original
#9d9ea0
Protanopia
#a0a0a0
Deuteranopia
#ad9b9d
Tritanopia
#9f9f9f
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
2.63:1
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
7.97:1

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
##AA9CA0
Display P3
Display P3
color(display-p3 0.6573 0.6137 0.6270)
Inside sRGBOKLCH chroma 0.017

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.

Related Colors

Canvas