Buoyant Lavanda
Buoyant Lavanda (#D4D6FA) is a soft blue with a pastel character. It reads calm and airy, with enough chroma to feel intentional rather than washed out. Its HSL profile (237°, 79%, 91%) places it in the highly saturated band at a light lightness. Best used in small doses, like logos, CTAs, focus rings, or highlight text, where its saturation becomes a feature rather than noise. For a confident two-color system, pair it with its complementary yellow. For something softer, pull in its analogous neighbors on either side of the wheel.
Etymology
Old French boie, floating — adjectival suffix -ant. As a color modifier, buoyant implies a pale-and-floating-and-lifted quality where the hue carries the visual register of cork-and-balloon-rising-and-floating spatial-and-mood weightless-feel. Sits at the pale-and-soft end of the grid, parallel to floaty and floating in usage.
Italian and Spanish for lavender (Lavandula angustifolia) — derived from Latin lavare, to wash, after the Roman use of lavender in bathwater. Lavanda color refers to a freshly cut Provençal lavanda sprig: a saturated, slightly cool deep blue-violet with the matte finish of essential-oil-rich lavender bracts. Cooler than English lavender, which trends paler and grayer.
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.