Steady Heliconia
Steady Heliconia (#F1ABD8) 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 (321°, 71%, 81%) 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
Old English stede, place, position — drifted to mean firm and unmoving. Used as a color modifier since the seventeenth century for hues that read as reliable rather than dramatic. Steady gray, steady green: moderate saturation combined with optical calmness. Sits in the crisp-bucket center alongside settled.
Central- and South-American lobster-claw (Heliconia rostrata) — a tropical Heliconiaceae perennial cultivated worldwide for its pendulous rostrate-bracted inflorescences in deep-magenta-and-yellow. Heliconia color refers to a fully developed Heliconia rostrata pendulous inflorescence: a saturated, slightly cool deep magenta with the matte finish of waxy bract-clusters. Named for Mount Helicon, the muses' Greek-mythological mountain.
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.