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Buttoned Aurora

#b48a6f
Notes

Buttoned Aurora (#B48A6F) is a true orange 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 (23°, 32%, 57%) 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 azure. For something softer, pull in its analogous neighbors on either side of the wheel.

HEX
#b48a6f
RGB
rgb(180, 138, 111)
HSL
hsl(23, 32%, 57%)
HWB
hwb(23 44% 29%)
OKLCH
oklch(66.7% 0.064 54.1)
P3
color(display-p3 0.6803 0.5477 0.4504)
HSV
hsv(23, 38%, 71%)
LAB
lab(60.81% 12.29 20.63)
LCH
lch(60.81% 24.02 59.21)
CMYK
cmyk(0%, 23%, 38%, 29%)

Etymology

Buttoned
adjective

Old French bouton, button — past-participle of button. As a color modifier, buttoned implies a clear-and-fastened-and-formal quality, the crisp color of Edwardian-period formal-attire fully-fastened-and-formally-dressed gentleman's-attire. Sits at the crisp-and-finished end of the grid, parallel to trim and pressed in usage.

Aurora
noun

The atmospheric phenomenon of charged particles colliding with the upper atmosphere — particularly the aurora borealis (northern lights) at high latitudes. While auroras span green and violet, the warm-orange variant occurs when particles collide with high-altitude atomic nitrogen. The color refers to an orange auroral curtain: a soft, slightly red orange with the optical translucency of upper-atmosphere emission.

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 explore

Harmonies

Accessibility

Color-vision simulation

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.

#b48a6f
Original
#968d6d
Protanopia
#a0966f
Deuteranopia
#c08283
Tritanopia
#919191
Achromatopsia
WCAG contrast

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.

The quick brown foxSample body text at normal size. The wcag minimum for body contrast is 4.5:1 (AA) or 7:1 (AAA).
AA Largeon White
3.09:1
The quick brown foxSample body text at normal size. The wcag minimum for body contrast is 4.5:1 (AA) or 7:1 (AAA).
AAon Black
6.81:1

Wide gamut

Display P3 representation

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.

sRGB hex
sRGB hex
##B48A6F
Display P3
Display P3
color(display-p3 0.6803 0.5477 0.4504)
Inside sRGBOKLCH chroma 0.064

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.

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