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Easy Forsythia

#d9c866
Notes

Easy Forsythia (#D9C866) is a true amber 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 (51°, 60%, 63%) 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 blue. For something softer, pull in its analogous neighbors on either side of the wheel.

HEX
#d9c866
RGB
rgb(217, 200, 102)
HSL
hsl(51, 60%, 63%)
HWB
hwb(51 40% 15%)
OKLCH
oklch(82.7% 0.121 99.6)
HSV
hsv(51, 53%, 85%)
LAB
lab(80.19% -6.55 50.57)
LCH
lch(80.19% 50.99 97.38)
CMYK
cmyk(0%, 8%, 53%, 15%)

Etymology

Easy
adjective

Old French aisié, comfortable, at rest — used as a color modifier since the eighteenth century for hues that read as visually undemanding. Easy beige, easy gray: moderate saturation combined with optical restfulness. Sits at the crisp-bucket center alongside calm and settled.

Forsythia
noun

Forsythia × intermedia, the East Asian shrub naturalized in European gardens — and the bright yellow flowers that cover bare branches in early spring before the leaves emerge. The color refers to a fresh Forsythia bloom in March: a saturated, slightly red-shifted bright yellow with the matte finish of small four-petaled flowers covering an entire shrub.

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 explore

Harmonies

Accessibility

Color-vision simulation

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.

#d9c866
Original
#d8c35d
Protanopia
#ddca6a
Deuteranopia
#e8bcb2
Tritanopia
#c5c5c5
Achromatopsia
WCAG contrast

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.

The quick brown foxSample body text at normal size. The wcag minimum for body contrast is 4.5:1 (AA) or 7:1 (AAA).
Failon White
1.69:1
The quick brown foxSample body text at normal size. The wcag minimum for body contrast is 4.5:1 (AA) or 7:1 (AAA).
AAAon Black
12.40:1

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