Delicate Cerulean
Delicate Cerulean (#B0C9CA) is a soft cyan with a cool character. It leans cool, sitting on the blue, green, and violet side of the wheel. Quiet and dependable, a fit for product UI and data visualization. Its HSL profile (182°, 20%, 74%) places it in the muted 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 red. For something softer, pull in its analogous neighbors on either side of the wheel.
Etymology
Latin dēlicātus, charming / refined. As a color modifier, delicate implies a pale-and-finely-detailed-and-careful quality where the hue carries the visual register of Wedgwood-and-Sèvres finely-detailed-and-carefully-painted porcelain-and-ceramic surface. Sits at the pale-and-delicate end of the grid, parallel to fragile and fine in usage.
From the Latin caeruleum, originally referring to dark blue paint pigment of the Roman world, then via French céruléen into English. As a modern art-supply name, cerulean blue is the cobalt-tin oxide pigment introduced in 1805. The color refers to a clean, slightly green-shifted blue with the matte finish of mineral pigment in linseed oil: lighter than cobalt, deeper than aqua, with the painter's weight of a word for sky.
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.
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.