Aqueous Honeydew
Aqueous Honeydew (#EAFFE9) is a soft green with a pastel character. It reads calm and airy, with enough chroma to feel intentional rather than washed out. Its HSL profile (117°, 100%, 96%) 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 violet. For something softer, pull in its analogous neighbors on either side of the wheel.
Etymology
Latin aquōsus, full of water — adjectival suffix -ous. As a color modifier, aqueous implies a pale-and-water-thin-and-translucent quality, the pale color of Japanese-sumi-e and Chinese-Song-dynasty-painting heavy-water-dilution ink-painting surface-finish. Sits at the pale-and-diluted end of the grid, parallel to watery and thinned in usage.
Old English honeg-dēaw, honey-dew — the pale-cool-pale-gray-and-pale-cream aphid-secreted carbohydrate-rich excrement of late-summer-and-autumn deciduous-tree-foliage, often colonized by Cladosporium sooty-mold fungus. Honeydew color refers to a freshly secreted aphid honeydew drop on a Acer-pseudoplatanus (sycamore) leaf-surface in raking late-summer light: a pale cool gray with the glossy finish of pure-sugar aphid-excreted carbohydrate-rich droplet on a polished-leaf surface.
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.