Ethereal Anil
Ethereal Anil (#BCBADD) is a soft blue with a pastel character. It reads calm and airy, with enough chroma to feel intentional rather than washed out. Its HSL profile (243°, 34%, 80%) places it in the balanced 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
From the Greek aithēr, upper air — used as a color modifier since the seventeenth century for hues that read as light, delicate, and otherworldly. Ethereal blue, ethereal pink: very low saturation combined with the optical impression of suspended-in-air translucency. Sits at the pale-bucket alongside ghostly.
Portuguese and Spanish for Indigofera tinctoria — derived via the Arabic al-nīl from the Sanskrit nīla (dark blue), the colonial-era European name for indigo before indigo itself supplanted it in the 18th century. Anil color refers to a freshly anil-dyed Portuguese azulejo-period linen: a saturated, slightly cool deep blue-violet with the matte finish of multi-bath fermentation indigo on hand-spun linen.
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.