Ghostly Tulip
Ghostly Tulip (#C3A8C3) is a soft violet with a cool character. It leans cool, sitting on the blue, green, and violet side of the wheel. Quiet and dependable, a fit for product UI and data visualization. Its HSL profile (300°, 18%, 71%) places it in the muted 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 green. For something softer, pull in its analogous neighbors on either side of the wheel.
Etymology
An adjectival form of ghost — used as a color modifier since the seventeenth century for hues that read as transparent or insubstantial. Ghostly white, ghostly blue: very low saturation combined with the optical impression of translucency. Sits at the pale-bucket extreme alongside whispered and ethereal.
The genus Tulipa — Central Asian bulbs cultivated in Ottoman gardens, brought to Europe in the sixteenth century, and famously the subject of tulipomania in the 1630s Dutch Republic. The color refers to a deep purple Tulipa hybrid in spring bloom: a saturated, slightly red-shifted deep purple with the satiny finish of a six-petaled goblet. Cooler than orchid, warmer than indigo, with the cultivation history of a flower that briefly cost more than houses.
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.