Phantom Acanthus
Phantom Acanthus (#C5CBEC) is a soft blue with a pastel character. It reads calm and airy, with enough chroma to feel intentional rather than washed out. Its HSL profile (231°, 51%, 85%) 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 amber. For something softer, pull in its analogous neighbors on either side of the wheel.
Etymology
Greek phántasma, apparition — adjectival usage of phantom. As a color modifier, phantom implies a pale-and-ghostly-and-translucent quality, the pale color of Edwardian-spirit-photograph and Pre-Raphaelite-painting ghostly-and-apparition supernatural-iconography. Sits at the pale-and-ethereal end of the grid, parallel to ghostly and wraithlike in usage.
Mediterranean Acanthus mollis and A. spinosus — the bear's breeches, whose deeply scalloped leaves furnished the Corinthian capital's signature ornamental motif since the 5th century BCE. Acanthus color refers to a fully bloomed Acanthus mollis flower spike: a saturated, slightly cool deep blue-violet with the velvet finish of two-lipped tubular flowers in a tall hooded spike. Foundational to the Western architectural ornamental vocabulary.
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.