Knightly Eve Bougainvillea
Knightly Eve Bougainvillea (#CE3489) is a true magenta 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 (327°, 61%, 51%) 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 teal. For something softer, pull in its analogous neighbors on either side of the wheel.
Etymology
Old English cniht, young man / knight — adjectival suffix -ly. As a color modifier, knightly implies a saturated-and-chivalrous-and-medieval quality, the deep-rich color of medieval-English-and-French knight-and-squire armorial-bearings-and-livery tradition. Sits at the bold-and-chivalrous end of the grid, parallel to gallant and cavalier.
Old English æfen, evening. As a color modifier, eve implies a sundown-and-twilight quality, the visual register of clear-sky western-horizon sunset-and-twilight Rayleigh-scattered Belt-of-Venus atmospheric pink-and-violet surfaces under early-evening twilight light. Sits at the modifier-and-time end of the grid, parallel to vesper and sundown in usage.
The genus Bougainvillea — South American vines named for the French explorer Louis Antoine de Bougainville, whose 1768 voyage encountered the plant in Rio de Janeiro. The color refers to the bracts (modified leaves) of a vivid magenta Bougainvillea spectabilis: a saturated, slightly cool deep pink-magenta with the matte papery finish of bracts that surround the plant's tiny actual flowers. Brighter than fuchsia, cooler than coral.
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.