Chalky Mǔdan
Chalky Mǔdan (#C4A3B8) is a true magenta 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 (322°, 22%, 70%) places it in the muted 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 green. For something softer, pull in its analogous neighbors on either side of the wheel.
Etymology
An adjectival form of chalk — used as a color modifier since the seventeenth century for hues with the matte finish of chalk pigment. Chalky white, chalky blue: low saturation combined with the optical mattness of micron-scale calcium carbonate. Sits at the pale-bucket alongside powder and dusty.
Chinese 牡丹, peony (Paeonia suffruticosa) — the King of Flowers in Chinese tradition, with deep magenta double-petaled cultivars cultivated since the Tang dynasty for imperial gardens. Mǔdan color refers to a fully bloomed Paeonia suffruticosa double-flower: a saturated, slightly cool deep magenta with the velvet finish of densely overlapping ruffled petals. The flower is China's unofficial national bloom.
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.