Faint Zhusha
Faint Zhusha (#CEAAB4) is a soft 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 (343°, 27%, 74%) places it in the muted 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 teal. For something softer, pull in its analogous neighbors on either side of the wheel.
Etymology
Old French faindre, to feign, weaken — used as a color modifier since the fifteenth century for hues that read as barely present. Faint pink, faint blue: very low saturation combined with high lightness. Sits at the pale-bucket extreme alongside whispered and ghostly.
The Chinese name for cinnabar — mercury sulfide — ground into the imperial-seal pigment used in Chinese painting, lacquerware, and the carved cinnabar-lacquer ornaments of the Ming dynasty. The color refers to a freshly stamped zhusha seal on rice paper: a saturated, slightly orange red with the matte finish of fine mineral pigment. Cooler than vermillion, brighter than crimson.
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.