True Yule Hibiscus
True Yule Hibiscus (#C03857) is a true red with an earthy character. It leans grounded and natural, the kind of color that plays well with wood, clay, linen, and warm neutrals. Its HSL profile (346°, 55%, 49%) 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 teal. For something softer, pull in its analogous neighbors on either side of the wheel.
Etymology
Old English trēowe, faithful — used as a color modifier since the seventeenth century for hues that read as the canonical version of their family. True red, true blue: the saturation is full, the hue is neither shifted nor adulterated. Sits at the center of the bold and crisp buckets, marking the unequivocal middle of any chromatic family.
Old Norse jól, winter-solstice. As a color modifier, yule implies a winter-solstice-and-fir-tree quality, the visual register of Norse-and-English winter-solstice fir-and-holly-and-mistletoe candlelit-firelight feast-and-greenery surfaces under deep-winter Northern-Hemisphere late-December candlelight. Sits at the modifier-and-time end of the grid, parallel to advent and easter in usage.
Hibiscus rosa-sinensis — the showy mallow of Pacific gardens, the Hawaiian state flower, the source of the deep red sorrel tea sold across West Africa as bissap. The color refers to a fully open hibiscus petal at midday: a hot, slightly magenta red with the velvet texture of a single-day bloom. By evening the same flower has wilted; by morning it's gone.
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.