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Buoyant Riviera

#c3a18e
Notes

Buoyant Riviera (#C3A18E) is a true orange 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 (22°, 31%, 66%) 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
#c3a18e
RGB
rgb(195, 161, 142)
HSL
hsl(22, 31%, 66%)
HWB
hwb(22 56% 24%)
OKLCH
oklch(73.5% 0.048 50.8)
P3
color(display-p3 0.7433 0.6364 0.5670)
HSV
hsv(22, 27%, 76%)
LAB
lab(68.78% 9.66 14.60)
LCH
lch(68.78% 17.50 56.51)
CMYK
cmyk(0%, 17%, 27%, 24%)

Etymology

Buoyant
adjective

Old French boie, floating — adjectival suffix -ant. As a color modifier, buoyant implies a pale-and-floating-and-lifted quality where the hue carries the visual register of cork-and-balloon-rising-and-floating spatial-and-mood weightless-feel. Sits at the pale-and-soft end of the grid, parallel to floaty and floating in usage.

Riviera
noun

The Mediterranean coast — particularly the Italian Riviera between Genoa and the French border, where stucco facades are limewashed in the warm orange-tan of terra di Genova. Riviera as a color refers to the limewashed walls of a Camogli or Cinque Terre village: a soft, slightly muted warm orange-tan with the matte finish of weathered limewash.

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.

#c3a18e
Original
#aaa48d
Protanopia
#b2ab8e
Deuteranopia
#cd9b9c
Tritanopia
#a7a7a7
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
2.38:1
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
8.81:1

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
##C3A18E
Display P3
Display P3
color(display-p3 0.7433 0.6364 0.5670)
Inside sRGBOKLCH chroma 0.048

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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