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Steady Teak

#bd9b5c
Notes

Steady Teak (#BD9B5C) 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 (39°, 42%, 55%) 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 azure. For something softer, pull in its analogous neighbors on either side of the wheel.

HEX
#bd9b5c
RGB
rgb(189, 155, 92)
HSL
hsl(39, 42%, 55%)
HWB
hwb(39 36% 26%)
OKLCH
oklch(70.7% 0.091 81.8)
P3
color(display-p3 0.7198 0.6129 0.3957)
HSV
hsv(39, 51%, 74%)
LAB
lab(65.78% 4.67 37.56)
LCH
lch(65.78% 37.85 82.92)
CMYK
cmyk(0%, 18%, 51%, 26%)

Etymology

Steady
adjective

Old English stede, place, position — drifted to mean firm and unmoving. Used as a color modifier since the seventeenth century for hues that read as reliable rather than dramatic. Steady gray, steady green: moderate saturation combined with optical calmness. Sits in the crisp-bucket center alongside settled.

Teak
noun

Tectona grandis, the Southeast Asian hardwood prized for its weather-resistance and used in shipbuilding, decking, and the colonial-era furniture of British India. The color refers to a freshly oiled Burmese teak deck: a saturated, slightly warm deep gold-brown with the satin finish of natural-oil-rich hardwood. Warmer than oak, drier than mahogany.

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.

#bd9b5c
Original
#aa9b57
Protanopia
#b2a35e
Deuteranopia
#cb908c
Tritanopia
#9e9e9e
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
2.62:1
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
8.01:1

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
##BD9B5C
Display P3
Display P3
color(display-p3 0.7198 0.6129 0.3957)
P3 has subtle headroomOKLCH chroma 0.091

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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