Polished Bluebonnet
Polished Bluebonnet (#B2AFEA) is a soft blue with a pastel character. It reads calm and airy, with enough chroma to feel intentional rather than washed out. Its HSL profile (243°, 58%, 80%) 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 yellow. For something softer, pull in its analogous neighbors on either side of the wheel.
Etymology
Latin polīre, to polish — past-participle of polish. As a color modifier, polished implies a clear-and-smooth-and-glossy quality where the hue carries the visual register of buffed-and-burnished smooth-finish surface. Sits at the crisp-and-finished end of the grid, parallel to burnished and gleaming in usage.
Lupinus texensis, the Texas state flower whose blue-and-white flower spikes color the highway shoulders of central Texas in March. The color refers to a fresh bluebonnet at peak bloom: a saturated, slightly violet-shifted blue with the matte finish of pea-family florets stacked along a single stem. Cooler than lupin, warmer than indigo, with the regional weight of a flower so identified with one state that it's printed on the license plates.
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.