Shaker Caliche
Shaker Caliche (#C5C2D3) is a soft indigo with a pastel character. It reads calm and airy, with enough chroma to feel intentional rather than washed out. Its HSL profile (251°, 16%, 79%) 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 yellow. For something softer, pull in its analogous neighbors on either side of the wheel.
Etymology
English Shaker, United-Society-of-Believers-in-Christ's-Second-Appearing — adjectival usage of Shaker. As a color modifier, shaker implies a neutral-and-plain-and-stripped-down quality, the neutral color of Shaker-furniture-and-craft anti-ornamental-and-functional hand-built-and-precise-craft surface-finish. Sits at the neutral-and-stripped-down end of the grid, parallel to quakerly and plain in usage.
Spanish caliche, calcium-cemented-soil-layer — the pale-cool-pale-gray calcium-carbonate-cemented-pedological-horizon of arid-and-semi-arid-soil systems, particularly the Atacama-Desert and American-Southwest-Sonoran-soil-profiles. Caliche color refers to a freshly excavated Atacama-Desert caliche horizon-face: a pale cool gray with the matte finish of fine-grained calcium-carbonate-cemented arid-soil-horizon with the characteristic caliche concrete-like texture.
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.