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Pressed Forsythia

#b8ae70
Notes

Pressed Forsythia (#B8AE70) is a true amber 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 (52°, 34%, 58%) 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 blue. For something softer, pull in its analogous neighbors on either side of the wheel.

HEX
#b8ae70
RGB
rgb(184, 174, 112)
HSL
hsl(52, 34%, 58%)
HWB
hwb(52 44% 28%)
OKLCH
oklch(74.5% 0.083 100.2)
P3
color(display-p3 0.7148 0.6837 0.4689)
HSV
hsv(52, 39%, 72%)
LAB
lab(70.62% -5.56 33.11)
LCH
lch(70.62% 33.58 99.54)
CMYK
cmyk(0%, 5%, 39%, 28%)

Etymology

Pressed
adjective

Latin pressāre, to press — past-participle of press. As a color modifier, pressed implies a clear-and-smoothed-and-flattened quality, the crisp color of Mid-Century-Modern freshly-pressed-shirt-and-trouser ironed-textile finish. Sits at the crisp-and-finished end of the grid, parallel to ironed and starched in usage.

Forsythia
noun

Forsythia × intermedia, the East Asian shrub naturalized in European gardens — and the bright yellow flowers that cover bare branches in early spring before the leaves emerge. The color refers to a fresh Forsythia bloom in March: a saturated, slightly red-shifted bright yellow with the matte finish of small four-petaled flowers covering an entire shrub.

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.

#b8ae70
Original
#b9aa6b
Protanopia
#bcaf72
Deuteranopia
#c2a69e
Tritanopia
#acacac
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).
Failon White
2.25:1
The quick brown foxSample body text at normal size. The wcag minimum for body contrast is 4.5:1 (AA) or 7:1 (AAA).
AAAon Black
9.33:1

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
##B8AE70
Display P3
Display P3
color(display-p3 0.7148 0.6837 0.4689)
P3 has subtle headroomOKLCH chroma 0.083

Moderately saturated colors gain a small bump in P3 — the difference is usually visible side-by-side on wide-gamut hardware but won't change the character of the color.

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