Powder Surkh
Powder Surkh (#EDCDDD) is a soft magenta with a pastel character. It reads calm and airy, with enough chroma to feel intentional rather than washed out. Its HSL profile (330°, 47%, 87%) 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 teal. For something softer, pull in its analogous neighbors on either side of the wheel.
Etymology
Talc — magnesium silicate ground to fine particles for personal hygiene since the nineteenth century. Powder blue refers to the pale, slightly green-shifted blue of mid-century Robin's-egg talc tins and the quilted cotton of newborn-boy nurseries: a soft, very pale blue with the matte finish of micron-scale particles. Lighter than periwinkle, warmer than ice, with the postwar consumer-goods association of a color tied to bath salts and powder rooms.
The Persian word for red in its most saturated, formal sense — used in Iranian poetry and miniature painting for the ribbons of court banners, the robes of warriors, and the high-saturation reds of Safavid tile. The color refers to a surkh-dyed Persian carpet: a saturated, slightly cool deep red with the matte finish of plant-dye-on-wool. Deeper than crimson, warmer than burgundy.
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.