Country Meringue
Country Meringue (#FDEBF0) 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 (343°, 82%, 96%) 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
Latin contrāta, land lying opposite — adjectival usage of country. As a color modifier, country implies a neutral-and-rural-and-traditional quality, the neutral color of American-Country and English-and-French-country rural-and-pastoral interior-decoration-and-textile surface-finish. Sits at the neutral-and-traditional end of the grid, parallel to rural and pastoral in usage.
French meringue, whipped-egg-white — the iconic pure-cream-pure-white whipped-egg-white-and-sugar baked-confection of French-and-Italian-and-American dessert tradition, the base of Pavlova-and-Eton-Mess. Meringue color refers to a freshly piped-and-baked Italian-meringue on a Pavlova dessert-base: a pure white with the matte finish of whipped-egg-white-and-sugar baked-confection with the characteristic meringue glossy-and-stiff-peak texture.
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.