Laconic Birman
Laconic Birman (#B4B3C3) is a soft blue 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 (244°, 12%, 73%) 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 yellow. For something softer, pull in its analogous neighbors on either side of the wheel.
Etymology
Greek Lakonikós, of-Lacedaemon — adjectival suffix -ic, referring to the Spartan-Lacedaemonian terse-and-restrained speech-style. As a color modifier, laconic implies a neutral-and-terse-and-unembellished quality, the neutral color of Spartan-and-Stoic-school unembellished-and-terse-formal color-decision. Sits at the neutral-and-quiet end of the grid, parallel to taciturn and reticent in usage.
Burmese long-haired cat breed — the iconic pale-cream-and-pale-gray colorpoint breed with white gauntlet paws, derived from temple-cats of Burma and brought to France in 1919. Birman color refers to a fully grown seal-point Birman cat dorsal-coat in raking light: a pale cool gray with the silky finish of colorpoint cool-cream-and-seal-pigmented fur with characteristic Birman gauntlet-paw white-pattern.
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.