Straightforward Pier Mint
Straightforward Pier Mint (#C9FAD2) is a soft green with a pastel character. It reads calm and airy, with enough chroma to feel intentional rather than washed out. Its HSL profile (131°, 83%, 88%) places it in the highly saturated band at a light lightness. Best used in small doses, like logos, CTAs, focus rings, or highlight text, where its saturation becomes a feature rather than noise. For a confident two-color system, pair it with its complementary magenta. For something softer, pull in its analogous neighbors on either side of the wheel.
Etymology
English compound straight + forward — sharing root with German geradeaus. As a color modifier, straightforward implies a clear-and-direct-and-unencumbered quality where the hue carries the visual register of clear-aim-and-uncomplicated character. Sits at the crisp-and-honest end of the grid, parallel to candid and direct in usage.
Old French piere, stone / pier. As a color modifier, pier implies a sea-extending-walkway quality, the visual register of Brighton-and-Blackpool Victorian-period iron-and-wooden sea-pier pleasure-and-amusement promenade surfaces under bright English-seaside Victorian-pier light. Sits at the modifier-and-place end of the grid, parallel to jetty and wharf in usage.
The genus Mentha — peppermint, spearmint, apple mint, water mint — the cooling herb whose menthol gives it that quality at the molecular level. The color refers to fresh peppermint leaves before drying: a clean, slightly cool green with the matte finish of trichome-rich leaf surface. Lighter than basil, cooler than parsley, with the mojito-and-Pimm's association of a herb tied to summer drinks across two continents.
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.