Neat Mussaenda
Neat Mussaenda (#D0AEDF) is a soft violet with a pastel character. It reads calm and airy, with enough chroma to feel intentional rather than washed out. Its HSL profile (282°, 43%, 78%) 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 green. For something softer, pull in its analogous neighbors on either side of the wheel.
Etymology
Old French net, clean / pure — sharing root with Latin nitidus. As a color modifier, neat implies a clear-and-orderly quality where the hue carries the well-arranged visual register without clutter or excess. Sits at the crisp-and-orderly end of the grid, parallel to trim and tidy in usage.
Asian Mussaenda philippica — a tropical shrub cultivated worldwide as a garden plant for its enlarged leaf-like bracts surrounding small inconspicuous flowers. Mussaenda color refers to a fully developed Mussaenda philippica bract-cluster: a saturated, slightly cool deep violet with the matte finish of leaf-tissue anthocyanin-rich modified sepals. The Sinhalese name mussaenda refers to the bract-and-flower structure.
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.