Etched Ki-iro
Etched Ki-iro (#CAE388) 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 (76°, 62%, 71%) 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.
Etymology
German ätzen, to etch — past-participle of etch. As a color modifier, etched implies a clear-and-precisely-incised quality, the crisp color of Rembrandt-and-Dürer hand-pulled etching-print fine-line incised-image. Sits at the crisp-and-incised end of the grid, parallel to engraved and inscribed in usage.
The Japanese word for yellow — built from ki (yellow) and iro (color). Used in the warm palette of ukiyo-e woodblock prints, kintsugi-repaired ceramics, and the gold-leafed wallpaper of Heian-period palaces. The color refers to ki-iro-painted byōbu folding screens: a saturated, slightly cool pure yellow with the matte finish of mineral-pigment-on-paper. The Japanese cousin of yellow.
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.