Soft Garance
Soft Garance (#F9CEC9) is a soft red with a pastel character. It reads calm and airy, with enough chroma to feel intentional rather than washed out. Its HSL profile (6°, 80%, 88%) 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 cyan. For something softer, pull in its analogous neighbors on either side of the wheel.
Etymology
Old English sōfte, gentle — used as a color modifier since the medieval period for hues that read as low-contrast and unaggressive. Soft pink, soft gray: low saturation combined with optical gentleness. Sits across the hushed and pale buckets alongside gentle.
The French word for madder — Rubia tinctorum — and the dye that colored French military uniforms from the eighteenth century until garance was replaced by synthetic alizarin in 1869. The color refers to garance-dyed French wool: a saturated, slightly cool deep red with the matte finish of plant-and-mordant dye. The French equivalent of madder.
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.