Sheer Lichen
Sheer Lichen (#B1C3A8) is a soft green 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 (100°, 18%, 71%) 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 violet. For something softer, pull in its analogous neighbors on either side of the wheel.
Etymology
Old English scīr, clear, pure — used as a color modifier since the eighteenth century for hues with the optical translucency of fine fabric. Sheer white, sheer blue: very low saturation combined with the optical impression of fabric with low fiber density. Sits at the pale-bucket alongside diaphanous.
The symbiotic body of a fungus and an alga (or cyanobacterium) — slow-growing, durable, and one of the few life forms that can colonize bare rock. The color refers to a mature Parmelia lichen on a tombstone or shed roof: a soft, slightly muted gray-green with the chalk finish of living crust. Cooler than sage, drier than moss, with the patient timekeeping of an organism that grows millimeters per year.
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.