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Cottony Indochina

#bab79e
Notes

Cottony Indochina (#BAB79E) 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 (54°, 17%, 67%) 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 blue. For something softer, pull in its analogous neighbors on either side of the wheel.

HEX
#bab79e
RGB
rgb(186, 183, 158)
HSL
hsl(54, 17%, 67%)
HWB
hwb(54 62% 27%)
OKLCH
oklch(77.5% 0.035 101.5)
P3
color(display-p3 0.7273 0.7180 0.6294)
HSV
hsv(54, 15%, 73%)
LAB
lab(74.05% -3.24 13.11)
LCH
lch(74.05% 13.51 103.88)
CMYK
cmyk(0%, 2%, 15%, 27%)

Etymology

Cottony
adjective

Arabic qutn, cotton — adjectival suffix -y. As a color modifier, cottony implies a pale-and-fluffy-and-soft quality, the pale color of Mississippi-Delta-and-Egyptian-Nile-Delta freshly-picked-and-ginned cotton-fiber-and-boll soft-and-fluffy textile-finish. Sits at the pale-and-soft end of the grid, parallel to fluffy and fleecy in usage.

Indochina
noun

The historical name for mainland Southeast Asia — Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia. Indochina as a color refers to the warm yellow of Cambodian and Vietnamese rice paddies in late autumn: a saturated, slightly red-shifted gold-yellow with the matte finish of ripening grain across an entire landscape.

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.

#bab79e
Original
#bcb59d
Protanopia
#bdb79f
Deuteranopia
#bfb3b0
Tritanopia
#b6b6b6
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
2.03:1
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
10.35:1

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
##BAB79E
Display P3
Display P3
color(display-p3 0.7273 0.7180 0.6294)
Inside sRGBOKLCH chroma 0.035

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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