Highborn Scud Fuchsia
Highborn Scud Fuchsia (#B331D1) is a true violet 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 (289°, 63%, 51%) places it in the balanced 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 green. For something softer, pull in its analogous neighbors on either side of the wheel.
Etymology
Old English hēah-boren, high-born — past-participle of bear. As a color modifier, highborn implies a saturated-and-aristocratic-and-elite quality, the deep-rich color of pre-modern English high-born aristocratic-class livery-and-armorial bearings. Sits at the bold-and-aristocratic end of the grid, parallel to noble and aristocratic in usage.
Origin obscure, low-fast-driven-cloud. As a color modifier, scud implies a low-fast-driven-cloud-and-storm-front quality, the visual register of North-Sea-and-Cornish-coast-scud hand-low-fast-driven-cloud-and-storm-front North-Sea-and-Cornish-coast-scud-and-Atlantic-front-cloud scud-and-low-fast-driven-cloud surfaces under North-Sea-and-Cornish-coast-scud-and-Atlantic-front-cloud Lizard-Point-and-Outer-Hebrides storm-front-cloud-light. Sits at the modifier-and-weather end of the grid, parallel to gust and mistral in usage.
The genus Fuchsia — South American shrubs named in 1703 for the German botanist Leonhart Fuchs. The color refers to the calyx and tube of a vibrant Fuchsia magellanica hybrid: a saturated, slightly cool deep pink-magenta with the satiny finish of a tubular hummingbird-pollinated flower. Brighter than rose, warmer than orchid, with the bedding-and-basket weight of a plant genus whose flowers gave English the most attention-demanding pink in the spectrum.
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 is chromatic enough that authoring it as P3 native (instead of clamping to sRGB) gives a perceptibly more saturated render on wide-gamut displays — modern Macs, iPhones, iPads, and most recent OLED laptops.