Plainspoken Mulberry
Plainspoken Mulberry (#FEBBEA) is a soft magenta with a pastel character. It reads calm and airy, with enough chroma to feel intentional rather than washed out. Its HSL profile (318°, 97%, 86%) 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 green. For something softer, pull in its analogous neighbors on either side of the wheel.
Etymology
English compound plain + spoken — past-participle of speak. As a color modifier, plainspoken implies a clear-and-direct-and-straightforward quality where the hue carries the visual register of unembellished-honest declaration. Sits at the crisp-and-honest end of the grid, parallel to candid and direct in usage.
The genus Morus — the white mulberry (M. alba) feeds silkworms; the black mulberry (M. nigra) bears the deep purple fruit that stains everything it touches. The color refers to a ripe black mulberry: a saturated, slightly red-shifted very deep purple with the slight juiciness of a compound fruit. Cooler than wine, warmer than indigo, with the agricultural weight of a tree that supported the entire Chinese silk industry for two thousand years.
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.