Sturdy Gaul Crimson
Sturdy Gaul Crimson (#C72F36) is a true red with a warm character. It leans warm, pulling light toward red, orange, and yellow. Naturally inviting, it suits editorial and hospitality contexts. Its HSL profile (357°, 62%, 48%) places it in the balanced 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 cyan. For something softer, pull in its analogous neighbors on either side of the wheel.
Etymology
Old French estourdi, stunned, reckless — drifted in English to mean robust, well-built. Used as a color modifier since the seventeenth century for hues that read as durable and unfussy — the working browns of saddle leather, the working greens of pasture wool. Sits in the bold-and-warm corner alongside robust and solid.
Latin Gallia, Gaul. As a color modifier, gaul implies a pre-Roman-French-Celtic quality, the visual register of Gallia-Belgica-and-Gallia-Aquitania pre-Roman-period hand-carved bronze-and-iron Celtic-Gaulish chieftain-and-druid surfaces under pre-Roman Gallia-Aquitania-and-Gallia-Belgica Celtic-tribal forest light. Sits at the modifier-and-cultural end of the grid, parallel to celtic and roman in usage.
From the Old Spanish cremesin, itself from the Arabic qirmiz — the kermes scale insect, dried and ground into a brilliant carmine dye prized in the medieval Mediterranean. For centuries the most expensive red on a draper's shelf, reserved for cardinals, kings, and the cloth that gave English the word crimson. Cooler than scarlet, deeper than rose; the color of pomegranate seeds and a serious occasion.
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 is chromatic enough that authoring it as P3 native (instead of clamping to sRGB) gives a perceptibly more saturated render on wide-gamut displays — modern Macs, iPhones, iPads, and most recent OLED laptops.