Idyllic Bleach
Idyllic Bleach (#D5E2EF) is a soft azure with a pastel character. It reads calm and airy, with enough chroma to feel intentional rather than washed out. Its HSL profile (210°, 45%, 89%) 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 orange. For something softer, pull in its analogous neighbors on either side of the wheel.
Etymology
Greek eidúllion, little-poem — adjectival suffix -ic. As a color modifier, idyllic implies a neutral-and-pastoral-and-perfect-rural quality, the neutral color of Theocritus-and-Virgil-Eclogues idyllic-and-poetic-rural pastoral-mood color treatment. Sits at the neutral-and-traditional end of the grid, parallel to bucolic and pastoral in usage.
Old English blǣcan, to whiten — adopted into English for the iconic pure-white chlorine-bleach-and-peroxide-bleach product of modern-laundry-and-paper-and-textile manufacture. Bleach color refers to a freshly bleached cotton-sheet on a Connecticut-laundry-line in raking afternoon-summer-light: a pure white with the matte finish of chlorine-bleached-and-cold-rinse hand-laundered pure-cotton sheet.
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.