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Candid Loki Teal

#acd1e9
Notes

Candid Loki Teal (#ACD1E9) is a soft azure with a pastel character. It reads calm and airy, with enough chroma to feel intentional rather than washed out. Its HSL profile (204°, 58%, 79%) 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 orange. For something softer, pull in its analogous neighbors on either side of the wheel.

HEX
#acd1e9
RGB
rgb(172, 209, 233)
HSL
hsl(204, 58%, 79%)
HWB
hwb(204 67% 9%)
OKLCH
oklch(84.2% 0.052 236.7)
P3
color(display-p3 0.7032 0.8153 0.9039)
HSV
hsv(204, 26%, 91%)
LAB
lab(81.98% -6.87 -15.83)
LCH
lch(81.98% 17.26 246.53)
CMYK
cmyk(26%, 10%, 0%, 9%)

Etymology

Candid
adjective

Latin candidus, bright-white / honest — derived from candēre (to shine). As a color modifier, candid implies a clear-and-honest-and-direct quality where the hue carries the visual register of straightforward-honest declaration. Sits at the crisp-and-honest end of the grid, parallel to frank and plainspoken in usage.

Loki
modifier

Old Norse Loki, trickster-god-and-shape-shifter. As a color modifier, loki implies a trickster-and-shape-shifter-and-sly quality, the visual register of Norse-Loki-and-Asgard-trickster hand-trickster-and-shape-shifter-and-sly Norse-Loki-and-Asgard-trickster-and-Ragnarok loki-and-trickster-and-shape-shifter-and-sly surfaces under Norse-Loki-and-Asgard-trickster-and-Ragnarok Yggdrasil-and-Aesir-pantheon shape-shifter-light. Sits at the modifier-and-myth end of the grid, parallel to thor and odin in usage.

Teal
noun

Anas crecca, the small dabbling duck whose male in breeding plumage sports a chestnut head crossed by a glossy green-blue stripe. The color refers to that stripe — the iridescent panel just behind the eye: a saturated, slightly muted blue-green with the optical depth of structural color rather than pigment. Cooler than cypress, warmer than cerulean, with the ornithological specificity of a color named for one feather of one bird.

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.

#acd1e9
Original
#c6d0ea
Protanopia
#bec9e9
Deuteranopia
#9ad7d9
Tritanopia
#cbcbcb
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
1.61:1
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
13.05:1

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
##ACD1E9
Display P3
Display P3
color(display-p3 0.7032 0.8153 0.9039)
Inside sRGBOKLCH chroma 0.052

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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