Purple
#800080
A magenta that is saturated. It is mid — the hardest range to put text on, either colour struggles.
Hex
#800080
RGB
128, 0, 128
OKLCh
42.1% 0.194 328.4°
CIELAB (D50)
29.7, 56.1, -36.3
What is true of this colour, and of no other
- 2 other named colours sit within ΔE00 2 of it.
- It sits exactly on the sRGB boundary: at this lightness and hue the gamut has nothing left, and a wider display would show a more colourful version of it.
- As text on white it measures APCA Lc 89.6; on black, Lc -12.7. 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 20.9 and 21.0 and 61.6 — no red cone.
Text on this colour
White text
9.42:1 — passes AA
Black text
2.23:1 — fails AA
White text is the better of the two at9.42:1. That is enough for body text.
The same colour, with one cone missing
As you see it
#800080
protanopia
#2b2b80 · ΔE00 20.9
deuteranopia
#47477f · ΔE00 21.0
tritanopia
#5c5c00 · ΔE00 61.6
The twelve nearest named colours
Ranked by CIEDE2000 — perceptual distance, not hex arithmetic. The closest isPhilippine Violet at ΔE00 0.389: below 1.0 — an ordinary observer cannot tell these apart, even side by side. What the numbers mean.
- Philippine VioletΔE00 0.389 · #81007f
- Mardi GrasΔE00 1.622 · #880085
- Aunt VioletΔE00 2.066 · #7c0087
- Violaceous GretiΔE00 2.314 · #881188
- Dark MagentaΔE00 2.42 · #8b008b
- Pure PurpleΔE00 3.07 · #751973
- Hello Darkness My Old FriendΔE00 3.105 · #802280
- UltraberryΔE00 3.239 · #770088
- PatriarchΔE00 3.493 · #800070
- Count’s WardrobeΔE00 3.51 · #772277
- Royal PurplenessΔE00 3.901 · #881177
- Purple Feather BoaΔE00 4.295 · #880099
9 of these have no page of their own: pages exist for the 4,961 colours the dataset marks as good names.