Watery Geel
Watery Geel (#FEF6D4) 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 (49°, 95%, 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
Old English wæter, water — adjectival suffix -y. As a color modifier, watery implies a pale-and-diluted-and-translucent quality, the pale color of watercolor-and-Japanese-sumi heavy-water-dilution paint-and-ink-thinned color. Sits at the pale-and-diluted end of the grid, parallel to diluted and thinned in usage.
The Dutch word for yellow — used in the painted facades of Amsterdam canal houses, the Vermeer-painted lemon yellow of Dutch genre painting, and the bright yellow tulip cultivars of Dutch flower auctions. The color refers to geel-painted seventeenth-century Dutch shutters: a saturated, slightly cool yellow with the matte finish of lead-and-oil paint.
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.