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Buttressed Tomato

#bc3389
Notes

Buttressed Tomato (#BC3389) is a true magenta 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 (322°, 57%, 47%) 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 green. For something softer, pull in its analogous neighbors on either side of the wheel.

HEX
#bc3389
RGB
rgb(188, 51, 137)
HSL
hsl(322, 57%, 47%)
HWB
hwb(322 20% 26%)
OKLCH
oklch(55.5% 0.192 346.7)
HSV
hsv(322, 73%, 74%)
LAB
lab(45.45% 61.51 -16.74)
LCH
lch(45.45% 63.75 344.77)
CMYK
cmyk(0%, 73%, 27%, 26%)

Etymology

Buttressed
adjective

Old French bouterez, thrusting-mass — past-participle of buttress, derived from bouter (to thrust). As a color modifier, buttressed implies a saturated-and-architecturally-supported quality, the deep-rich color of Gothic-Cathedral flying-buttress-and-rib-vault stone-architecture. Sits at the bold-and-fortified end of the grid, parallel to fortified and reinforced.

Tomato
noun

Solanum lycopersicum — domesticated in Mesoamerica, suspect in sixteenth-century Europe (the Italians called it pomo d'oro, golden apple), and now the most-grown fruit on earth. The color refers to a fully ripe vine-tomato: a saturated red-orange that's warmer than scarlet and brighter than brick. The pigment, lycopene, is the same one that colors watermelon and pink grapefruit.

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

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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.

#bc3389
Original
#455d8b
Protanopia
#6e7486
Deuteranopia
#c92f5a
Tritanopia
#565656
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).
AAon White
5.29:1
The quick brown foxSample body text at normal size. The wcag minimum for body contrast is 4.5:1 (AA) or 7:1 (AAA).
AA Largeon Black
3.97:1

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