Pleasant Purple

#8833aa

A magenta that is saturated. It is mid — the hardest range to put text on, either colour struggles.

Hex

#8833aa

RGB

136, 51, 170

OKLCh

49.6% 0.189 314.6°

CIELAB (D50)

38.4, 50.2, -48.0

What is true of this colour, and of no other

  • No other named colour in the set is within ΔE00 2 of it — it stands alone.
  • It uses 77% of the chroma sRGB can show at this lightness and hue.
  • As text on white it measures APCA Lc 82.5; on black, Lc -19.4. The sign is the polarity, which the WCAG ratio discards.
  • Built into an eleven-step scale, 10 of the 10 adjacent pairs stay ΔE00 2 apart — see the ramp.
  • protanopia and deuteranopia and tritanopia shift it by ΔE00 16.6 and 16.5 and 64.0 — no red cone.

Text on this colour

White text

6.77:1 — passes AA

Black text

3.10:1 — large text only

White text is the better of the two at6.77:1. That is enough for body text.

The same colour, with one cone missing

As you see it

#8833aa

protanopia

#4444aa · ΔE00 16.6

deuteranopia

#5757a9 · ΔE00 16.5

tritanopia

#686800 · ΔE00 64.0

Run a whole palette through all three

The twelve nearest named colours

Ranked by CIEDE2000 — perceptual distance, not hex arithmetic. The closest isMinesweeper’s Purple at ΔE00 3.036: between 2 and 5 — clearly two colours when compared, easily mistaken from memory. What the numbers mean.

9 of these have no page of their own: pages exist for the 4,961 colours the dataset marks as good names.