Iridescent Murex
Iridescent Murex (#DC85E8) is a soft violet with a cool character. It leans cool, sitting on the blue, green, and violet side of the wheel. Quiet and dependable, a fit for product UI and data visualization. Its HSL profile (293°, 68%, 72%) 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
Latin Īris, rainbow — adjectival suffix -escent, named for the Greek goddess of the rainbow. As a color modifier, iridescent implies a saturated-and-multi-spectrum-shifting quality, the bright color of peacock-feather-and-soap-bubble structurally-colored-and-thin-film optical-interference patterns. Sits at the bright-and-shifting end of the grid, parallel to prismatic and holographic in usage.
Bolinus brandaris and Hexaplex trunculus — the two principal Mediterranean sea-snail genera whose hypobranchial-gland secretion was processed into Tyrian purple dye for two-and-a-half millennia. Murex color refers to a freshly Murex-dye-bath-emerged Phoenician trade-textile: a saturated, slightly cool deep violet with the matte finish of multi-bath shellfish-dye on hand-loomed Levantine wool. The Latin murex gives English murexide, a synthetic violet-red dye.
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.