Pastel Beige
Pastel Beige (#FDF3D5) is a soft amber with a pastel character. It reads calm and airy, with enough chroma to feel intentional rather than washed out. Its HSL profile (45°, 91%, 91%) 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 blue. For something softer, pull in its analogous neighbors on either side of the wheel.
Etymology
French pastel, paste-pigment — derived from Latin pasta (paste). As a color modifier, pastel implies a pale-and-soft-and-lightly-tinted quality, the pale color of Degas-and-Cassatt late-19th-century pastel-on-paper soft-pigment-and-fine-powder surface-finish on hand-textured laid paper. Sits at the pale-and-faintly-colored end of the grid, parallel to tinted and tinged in usage.
The French word for natural-colored unbleached wool — borrowed into English in the late nineteenth century as a generic name for the soft warm tan of undyed natural fiber. The color refers to undyed Saxon merino: a soft, slightly muted warm tan with the matte finish of natural plant-and-animal fiber. Lighter than tan, warmer than linen.
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.