Purple Pleasures

#81459e

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

Hex

#81459e

RGB

129, 69, 158

OKLCh

50.2% 0.147 313.4°

CIELAB (D50)

40.0, 37.8, -38.4

What is true of this colour, and of no other

  • One other named colour sits within ΔE00 2 of it.
  • It uses 59% of the chroma sRGB can show at this lightness and hue.
  • As text on white it measures APCA Lc 81.4; on black, Lc -20.4. 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 14.3 and 13.8 and 59.4 — no red cone.

Text on this colour

White text

6.41:1 — passes AA

Black text

3.28:1 — large text only

White text is the better of the two at6.41:1. That is enough for body text.

The same colour, with one cone missing

As you see it

#81459e

protanopia

#4f4f9e · ΔE00 14.3

deuteranopia

#5c5c9d · ΔE00 13.8

tritanopia

#686800 · ΔE00 59.4

Run a whole palette through all three

The twelve nearest named colours

Ranked by CIEDE2000 — perceptual distance, not hex arithmetic. The closest isCadmium Violet at ΔE00 1.988: between 1 and 2 — a trained eye spots it when the two touch; nobody spots it across a room. What the numbers mean.

  • Cadmium VioletΔE00 1.988 · #7f3e98
  • Murasaki PurpleΔE00 2.934 · #884898
  • Purple SapphireΔE00 3.993 · #754b8f
  • Perkin MauveΔE00 4.013 · #733c8e
  • Dull VioletΔE00 4.185 · #803790
  • Harley Hair PurpleΔE00 4.258 · #8547b5
  • Pleasant PurpleΔE00 4.396 · #8833aa
  • Amaranth PurpleΔE00 4.396 · #723f89
  • ShinerΔE00 4.42 · #773ca7
  • Tyrian ShimmerΔE00 4.422 · #9448b0
  • StudioΔE00 4.496 · #724aa1
  • Royal LilacΔE00 4.573 · #84549b

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