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Tinted Whiskey

#bcaa8b
Notes

Tinted Whiskey (#BCAA8B) 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 (38°, 27%, 64%) 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 azure. For something softer, pull in its analogous neighbors on either side of the wheel.

HEX
#bcaa8b
RGB
rgb(188, 170, 139)
HSL
hsl(38, 27%, 64%)
HWB
hwb(38 55% 26%)
OKLCH
oklch(74.5% 0.047 81.2)
P3
color(display-p3 0.7254 0.6692 0.5590)
HSV
hsv(38, 26%, 74%)
LAB
lab(70.39% 1.62 18.38)
LCH
lch(70.39% 18.45 84.97)
CMYK
cmyk(0%, 10%, 26%, 26%)

Etymology

Tinted
adjective

Latin tīnctus, dyed — past-participle of tint. As a color modifier, tinted implies a pale-and-faintly-colored quality where the hue carries the visual register of base-white-or-neutral lightly-mixed-with-pigment surface. Sits at the pale-and-faintly-colored end of the grid, parallel to tinged and pastel in usage.

Whiskey
noun

The distilled grain spirit — particularly Scotch, Irish, and American whiskies aged in oak barrels. The color refers to a 12-year-old single-malt Scotch in a glass: a soft, slightly red-shifted warm gold-brown with the optical clarity of barrel-aged spirit. Warmer than honey, drier than caramel.

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.

#bcaa8b
Original
#b2a989
Protanopia
#b7ae8c
Deuteranopia
#c4a4a1
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
2.27:1
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
9.26:1

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
##BCAA8B
Display P3
Display P3
color(display-p3 0.7254 0.6692 0.5590)
Inside sRGBOKLCH chroma 0.047

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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