Airy Argaman
Airy Argaman (#B39697) is a true red with a warm character. It leans warm, pulling light toward red, orange, and yellow. Naturally inviting, it suits editorial and hospitality contexts. Its HSL profile (358°, 16%, 65%) places it in the muted 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 cyan. For something softer, pull in its analogous neighbors on either side of the wheel.
Etymology
Greek aēr, air — adjectival suffix -y, sharing root with Latin āer. As a color modifier, airy implies a pale-and-light-and-airborne quality, the pale color of Provençal-and-Tuscan mid-summer afternoon-warm-and-airy atmospheric-and-spatial-condition. Sits at the pale-and-soft end of the grid, parallel to aerial and atmospheric in usage.
The Hebrew word for the imperial purple of Tyre — used in the Hebrew Bible as the color of priestly garments, royal robes, and tabernacle hangings. Argaman is derived from the murex sea snail, dyed at industrial scale at the Phoenician city of Tyre. The color refers to argaman-dyed wool: a deep, slightly cool red-purple with the matte finish of multi-bath shellfish dye. Cooler than crimson.
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.