Rural Pieris
Rural Pieris (#E0F4FD) is a soft cyan with a pastel character. It reads calm and airy, with enough chroma to feel intentional rather than washed out. Its HSL profile (199°, 88%, 94%) 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 orange. For something softer, pull in its analogous neighbors on either side of the wheel.
Etymology
Latin rūrālis, of-the-countryside — adjectival suffix -al. As a color modifier, rural implies a neutral-and-country-and-traditional quality, the neutral color of American-and-English-Country rural-and-traditional farmhouse-and-cottage interior-decoration-and-textile surface-finish. Sits at the neutral-and-traditional end of the grid, parallel to country and pastoral in usage.
Asian Pieris japonica (lily-of-the-valley shrub) — an Ericaceae evergreen shrub native to Japan, with iconic pure-white pendulous urn-shaped-flower racemes. Pieris color refers to a fully bloomed Pieris japonica pendulous raceme in a Kyoto temple-garden: a pure white with the velvet finish of dense small urn-shaped fused-petaled bell-flowers in pendulous racemes against deep-green leathery foliage.
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.