Wisp Madder
Wisp Madder (#F9D5D4) 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 (2°, 76%, 90%) 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
Middle English wisp, small bundle — used as a color modifier since the seventeenth century for hues that read as barely-present or evanescent. Wisp white, wisp pink: very low saturation combined with the optical impression of something just barely there. Sits at the pale-bucket extreme alongside faint.
Rubia tinctorum, the dyer's madder — the root pigment that fed European red textile production from antiquity until synthetic alizarin replaced it in 1869. Less brilliant than kermes, more lightfast than safflower, madder-dyed wool was the workhorse red of Persian carpets, British redcoats, and Turkish kilim. The color carries that history: a warm, slightly orange red with the matte finish of cloth rather than glaze.
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.