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Fairylike Polenta

#aca587
Notes

Fairylike Polenta (#ACA587) 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 (49°, 18%, 60%) 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
#aca587
RGB
rgb(172, 165, 135)
HSL
hsl(49, 18%, 60%)
HWB
hwb(49 53% 33%)
OKLCH
oklch(72.0% 0.042 96.4)
P3
color(display-p3 0.6697 0.6480 0.5419)
HSV
hsv(49, 22%, 67%)
LAB
lab(67.60% -2.50 16.49)
LCH
lch(67.60% 16.68 98.62)
CMYK
cmyk(0%, 4%, 22%, 33%)

Etymology

Fairylike
adjective

Old French faerie, fairy — adjectival suffix -like. As a color modifier, fairylike implies a pale-and-magical-and-light quality, the pale color of Pre-Raphaelite-painting and Golden-Age-illustration fairy-and-supernatural soft-light-and-magical iconography. Sits at the pale-and-ethereal end of the grid, parallel to elfin and sylphine in usage.

Polenta
noun

Italian cornmeal porridge — eaten across northern Italy as a staple grain since corn arrived from the Americas in the sixteenth century. The color refers to a fresh-cooked yellow polenta: a saturated, slightly red-shifted gold-yellow with the matte finish of cooked maize. Warmer than buttercup.

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.

#aca587
Original
#aba385
Protanopia
#ada688
Deuteranopia
#b2a09d
Tritanopia
#a4a4a4
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
2.47:1
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
8.49:1

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
##ACA587
Display P3
Display P3
color(display-p3 0.6697 0.6480 0.5419)
Inside sRGBOKLCH chroma 0.042

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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