colors
Back to gallery

Steady Sage

#c4ea9b
Notes

Steady Sage (#C4EA9B) is a soft lime 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 (89°, 65%, 76%) places it in the balanced 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 indigo. For something softer, pull in its analogous neighbors on either side of the wheel.

HEX
#c4ea9b
RGB
rgb(196, 234, 155)
HSL
hsl(89, 65%, 76%)
HWB
hwb(89 61% 8%)
OKLCH
oklch(89.1% 0.111 129.3)
HSV
hsv(89, 34%, 92%)
LAB
lab(88.42% -25.75 34.42)
LCH
lch(88.42% 42.99 126.79)
CMYK
cmyk(16%, 0%, 34%, 8%)

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.

Sage
noun

Salvia officinalis, the Mediterranean kitchen herb whose silvery-green leaves give the color its name. The Latin salvia shares a root with salvuswhole, healthy — for the herb's medieval reputation as a panacea. The color refers to dried sage leaves rubbed for stuffing: a soft, slightly gray-green that's cooler than olive and warmer than mint, with the matte finish of leaf hair under a hand lens.

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.

#c4ea9b
Original
#f1e096
Protanopia
#ecdd9f
Deuteranopia
#c7e3d6
Tritanopia
#dcdcdc
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
1.35:1
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
15.59:1

Related Colors

Canvas