Lit Alizarin
Lit Alizarin (#FC6DBA) is a soft magenta with a cool character. It leans cool, sitting on the blue, green, and violet side of the wheel. Quiet and dependable, a fit for product UI and data visualization. Its HSL profile (328°, 96%, 71%) 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 teal. For something softer, pull in its analogous neighbors on either side of the wheel.
Etymology
The past participle of light — short and modern. Used as a color word since the late twentieth century for hues that read as if they were illuminated. Lit yellow, lit pink: the implication is luminance combined with the slight optical impression of an internal light source. Sits in the bright-bucket extreme alongside electric.
1,2-dihydroxyanthraquinone — the principal anthraquinone dye component of madder root (Rubia tinctorum), first isolated and synthesized in 1869 by Carl Graebe and Carl Liebermann. Alizarin color refers to a freshly alizarin-mordant-dyed wool: a saturated, slightly cool deep magenta with the matte finish of anthraquinone-dye-on-mordanted woolen fiber. The first natural pigment to be replaced by a synthetic.
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 is chromatic enough that authoring it as P3 native (instead of clamping to sRGB) gives a perceptibly more saturated render on wide-gamut displays — modern Macs, iPhones, iPads, and most recent OLED laptops.