Healthful Wood Moss
Healthful Wood Moss (#CAF3AC) is a soft lime with a pastel character. It reads calm and airy, with enough chroma to feel intentional rather than washed out. Its HSL profile (95°, 75%, 81%) 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
Old English hǣlth, health — adjectival suffix -ful. As a color modifier, healthful implies a clear-and-vital-and-wholesome quality where the hue carries the visual register of fresh-air-and-sunlight outdoor health-promoting environment. Sits at the crisp-and-wholesome end of the grid, parallel to salubrious and wholesome in usage.
Old English wudu, forest. As a color modifier, wood implies a deciduous-canopy-and-litter quality, the visual register of English-and-Welsh oak-and-beech mixed-deciduous forest leaf-litter-and-canopy hand-walked path surfaces in dappled-deciduous-broadleaf-canopy filtered-light. Sits at the modifier-and-place end of the grid, parallel to copse and grove in usage.
Bryophyta — the nonvascular plants that colonized land 470 million years ago, before vascular plants and far before flowers. The color refers to a thick mat of Hypnum or sphagnum on a temperate forest floor: a soft, slightly yellow-shifted green with the velvet texture of millimeter-scale leaves. Dustier than fern, deeper than lichen, with the slow patience of a plant that lives by absorbing rain through its surface.
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.
Moderately saturated colors gain a small bump in P3 — the difference is usually visible side-by-side on wide-gamut hardware but won't change the character of the color.