Color Memory Game
← Back to articles
By John K.··15 min read

Shades of teal: 54 names, hex codes, and why teal is measurably a green

Every named shade of teal and turquoise with its hex code, measured in CIELAB and compared with CIEDE2000. Teal sits 24.8 degrees on the green side of the green-blue midpoint, and the gap between teal and turquoise is 98 percent lightness rather than hue.

Teal gets filed under blue. Paint charts put it there, clothing sites put it there, and the name itself comes from the Eurasian teal, a duck with a band of colour across its head that most people would describe as blue-green if pushed and blue if not.

So I measured the teal vocabulary, and on hue it is not a blue at all. Take the CIELAB hue angle of pure green and pure blue in sRGB, draw the arc between them, and teal lands at 35.4 percent of the way across. It sits 24.8 degrees on the green side of the midpoint. Every method I tried that isolates hue from lightness says the same thing: teal is closer to green.

The interesting part is why nobody experiences it that way. Compare teal to pure green and pure blue without controlling for anything and the answer flips: CIEDE2000 puts teal 45.61 from green and only 38.98 from blue. That comparison is not measuring hue. It is measuring darkness. Pure green in sRGB is a bright colour at L* 88, pure blue is a dark one at L* 32, and teal at L* 48 is much nearer the dark end. Hold lightness and chroma fixed and rotate hue alone, and the distances become 19.61 to green against 32.16 to blue.

Teal reads as blue because it is dark, not because it is blue. That one confusion turns out to run through the entire family, and it is what this article is really about.

This is the same measurement I ran on the reds, the oranges, the yellows, the greens, the blues, the purples, the pinks, the browns and the grays. Teal is the awkward one, because it is the only family whose name is a boundary dispute rather than a hue.

Is teal blue or green? The measured answer

Start with the hex code, because it contains the whole argument. Teal is #008080: red at zero, green and blue at exactly 128 each. In RGB terms it is dead centre, the precise arithmetic average of pure green and pure blue. If you mix #00ff00 and #0000ff in equal parts you get #008080 exactly.

But RGB channel values are not perception. Convert that same colour to CIELAB and the hue angle comes out at 196.4 degrees. Green sits at 136.0 and blue at 306.3, which puts their midpoint at 221.2. Teal is nowhere near it. A colour that is arithmetically balanced between green and blue is perceptually well over on the green side, because equal RGB numbers do not buy equal perceptual weight. Blue is the weakest channel in the eye and it takes far more of it to shift a hue than the numbers suggest.

Three ways of asking the question, three answers that agree once lightness is controlled:

  • Hue angle. Teal at 196.4 degrees, 24.8 degrees on the green side of the 221.2 midpoint. Green.
  • Hue rotation at matched lightness and chroma. 19.61 to green, 32.16 to blue. Green, by a wide margin.
  • Raw CIEDE2000 to the pure primaries. 45.61 to green, 38.98 to blue. Blue, but only because pure green is 40 lightness points brighter than teal and pure blue is 16 points darker.

The third one is the comparison people make by eye, and it is the one that is contaminated. This is the same effect that shows up when you measure true opponent complements against RGB inversion, where 77 percent of the difference turned out to be lightness rather than hue. Lightness dominates naive colour judgements far more than people expect it to.

So the honest answer to whether teal is blue or green is that its hue is green-leaning and its lightness is blue-leaning, and the popular answer tracks the lightness. If someone tells you teal is a dark blue-green, they are closer than the paint chart.

Teal versus turquoise, measured

The standard explanation is that turquoise is the bluer one and teal is the darker, greener one. Half of that is right. I split the named set into a teal group of 28 names, a turquoise group of 10 and an aqua or cyan group of 8, took the centroid of each in CIELAB, and measured the gaps.

  • Teal, 28 names. Mean L* 49.3, mean hue 193.9, mean C* 26.3.
  • Turquoise, 10 names. Mean L* 79.1, mean hue 188.4, mean C* 37.1.
  • Aqua and cyan, 8 names. Mean L* 85.8, mean hue 187.2, mean C* 30.3.

Turquoise is not bluer than teal. It is greener, by 5.5 degrees. What it actually is, overwhelmingly, is lighter: nearly 30 lightness points lighter. The centroid-to-centroid CIEDE2000 distance between teal and turquoise is 25.20. Move lightness alone and you cover 24.72 of it, which is 98 percent. Move hue and chroma alone, leaving lightness where it was, and you cover 4.89.

Run the same decomposition down the rest of the ladder and it holds:

  • Teal to turquoise: dE 25.20, of which lightness alone accounts for 98.1 percent.
  • Turquoise to aqua: dE 5.80, lightness 78.1 percent. The two are close enough that the remainder starts to matter.
  • Teal to aqua: dE 29.17, lightness 99.5 percent. Hue and chroma together account for 2.78 of a 29-point gap.

Across all three families the mean hue moves a total of 6.7 degrees while the mean lightness moves 36.4 points. Teal, turquoise and aqua are not three hues. They are one hue at three brightness levels, and English has given each brightness level its own name while pretending the distinction is chromatic.

The hue ranges do not even separate. Teal names run from 153.0 to 229.2 degrees, turquoise names from 155.2 to 198.6. That is 43.5 degrees of overlap, which is most of both ranges. If you were handed a hue angle in this region with no lightness information, you could not tell which family it came from. Handed the lightness alone, you would get it right most of the time: every turquoise in the set sits above L* 68, and 26 of the 28 teals sit below it.

Five names, one hue angle

The clearest illustration in the whole set. These five names all measure at exactly 196.4 degrees of CIELAB hue, to the decimal:

  • Teal, #008080. L* 48.3, C* 30.1.
  • Dark cyan, #008b8b. L* 52.2, C* 31.9.
  • Skobeloff, #007474. L* 43.9, C* 28.0.
  • Robin egg blue, #00cccc. L* 74.5, C* 42.4.
  • Cyan, also called aqua, #00ffff. L* 91.1, C* 50.1.

The reason is structural rather than coincidental. Every one of these has red at zero and green exactly equal to blue, and any colour built that way lands on the same line out from the neutral axis. It is one hue, sampled at five brightnesses, carrying five unrelated names. One of them is even called a blue.

The 54 named shades, dark to light, with hex codes

Sorted by CIELAB lightness. L* is lightness on a 0 to 100 scale, C* is chroma, and hue is the CIELAB hue angle in degrees. For orientation: green sits at 136.0, cyan at 196.4, and blue at 306.3, so everything below is in the cyan neighbourhood whatever its name claims.

Deep, below L* 40

Seven names, and the band where teal is most often mistaken for a navy. Note that dark slate gray, a CSS gray keyword, sits here on hue with the teals rather than with the neutrals.

  • Charleston green, #232b2b. L* 16.8, C* 3.7, hue 198.6. Nearly neutral, and a gray by any practical test.
  • Deep teal, #003b46. L* 22.2, C* 17.2, hue 222.7. The bluest name in the entire set.
  • Midnight green, #004953. L* 27.8, C* 19.6, hue 216.4. Called green, and measures bluer than several names called blue.
  • Dark teal, #014d4e. L* 29.1, C* 20.8, hue 198.2.
  • Rich teal, #0f4d4d. L* 29.3, C* 19.3, hue 196.6.
  • Dark slate gray, #2f4f4f. L* 31.3, C* 12.3, hue 197.6. A CSS keyword filed as a gray, sitting squarely on the teal hue line.
  • Peacock blue, #005f69. L* 36.4, C* 23.4, hue 212.3.

Mid, L* 40 to 60

Sixteen names, and the core of what people mean by teal. Teal itself sits almost exactly in the middle. Cerulean and sea green are included as the boundary markers on the blue and green sides.

  • Teal green, #006d5b. L* 40.7, C* 31.5, hue 175.4. The greenest of the teal-prefixed names.
  • Caribbean current, #006d6f. L* 41.3, C* 26.5, hue 199.1.
  • Skobeloff, #007474. L* 43.9, C* 28.0, hue 196.4. Named after a Russian general, for reasons nobody has satisfactorily explained.
  • Ming, #36747d. L* 45.3, C* 20.4, hue 212.8.
  • Pine green, #01796f. L* 45.4, C* 31.0, hue 184.9.
  • Teal blue, #367588. L* 46.0, C* 21.8, hue 229.2. The only teal-prefixed name that earns the blue half of its label.
  • Myrtle green, #317873. L* 46.1, C* 23.7, hue 189.6.
  • Cerulean, #007ba7. L* 48.2, C* 33.8, hue 248.6. Genuinely a blue, and included as the boundary marker on that side.
  • Teal, #008080. L* 48.3, C* 30.1, hue 196.4. The anchor, and a CSS keyword since 1996.
  • Viridian, #40826d. L* 49.7, C* 26.9, hue 169.4. A real pigment, chromium oxide green, and the greenest thing still called a teal.
  • Celadon green, #2f847c. L* 50.2, C* 27.4, hue 186.7. Named after a ceramic glaze.
  • Sea green, #2e8b57. L* 51.5, C* 44.5, hue 153.2. Genuinely a green, and the boundary marker on the other side.
  • Dark cyan, #008b8b. L* 52.2, C* 31.9, hue 196.4.
  • Steel teal, #5f8a8b. L* 54.5, C* 15.3, hue 200.1.
  • Bondi blue, #0095b6. L* 56.9, C* 33.9, hue 231.4.
  • Blue-green, #0d98ba. L* 58.1, C* 34.0, hue 232.3.

Light mid, L* 60 to 75

Thirteen names, and the band where teal hands off to turquoise. The handoff happens on lightness, not hue.

  • Persian green, #00a693. L* 61.1, C* 40.5, hue 180.6.
  • Cadet blue, #5f9ea0. L* 61.2, C* 21.0, hue 200.7. Another CSS keyword called a blue while sitting on the cyan line.
  • Zomp, #39a78e. L* 62.0, C* 37.3, hue 174.1.
  • Teal blue, Crayola version, #18a7b5. L* 62.6, C* 34.2, hue 210.2. Crayola and the general-purpose teal blue disagree by 17 lightness points.
  • Jungle green, #29ab87. L* 62.8, C* 43.9, hue 168.4.
  • Medium sea green, #3cb371. L* 65.3, C* 54.0, hue 153.3.
  • Keppel, #3ab09e. L* 65.3, C* 36.8, hue 180.5.
  • Light sea green, #20b2aa. L* 65.8, C* 38.0, hue 189.6.
  • Verdigris, #43b3ae. L* 66.9, C* 33.1, hue 191.9. The colour copper turns as it corrodes, which is why the Statue of Liberty is a teal.
  • Tiffany blue, #0abab5. L* 68.4, C* 40.0, hue 192.3. Trademarked, and a blue in name only.
  • Maximum blue green, #30bfbf. L* 70.6, C* 37.4, hue 196.6.
  • Emerald, #50c878. L* 72.5, C* 59.5, hue 149.4. A green, included to show where the family stops.
  • Robin egg blue, #00cccc. L* 74.5, C* 42.4, hue 196.4. Identical to dark turquoise within the detection threshold.

Bright, above L* 75

Eighteen names, almost all of them turquoises and aquas. This is where the family stops being called teal at all, despite the hue barely moving.

  • Dark turquoise, #00ced1. L* 75.3, C* 42.3, hue 198.6. Called dark while sitting in the top quarter of the lightness range.
  • Medium aquamarine, #66cdaa. L* 75.7, C* 39.2, hue 167.8.
  • Medium turquoise, #48d1cc. L* 76.9, C* 38.3, hue 192.6.
  • Turquoise green, #a0d6b4. L* 81.2, C* 26.7, hue 155.2.
  • Turquoise, #40e0d0. L* 81.3, C* 44.3, hue 185.2.
  • Middle blue green, #8dd9cc. L* 81.6, C* 26.4, hue 182.3.
  • Light teal, #b2d8d8. L* 83.7, C* 13.1, hue 198.5.
  • Sea foam green, #9fe2bf. L* 84.8, C* 30.1, hue 159.7.
  • Teal deer, #99e6b3. L* 85.3, C* 38.4, hue 153.0. The greenest name in the set by a distance, and barely a teal at all.
  • Powder blue, #b0e0e6. L* 86.1, C* 16.2, hue 209.6.
  • Spring green, #00ff7f. L* 88.5, C* 90.1, hue 148.6. A green, and the brightest thing in the sample.
  • Pale turquoise, #afeeee. L* 90.1, C* 20.7, hue 198.1.
  • Turquoise blue, #00ffef. L* 90.7, C* 53.0, hue 187.0. The most saturated colour in the set.
  • Cyan, or aqua, #00ffff. L* 91.1, C* 50.1, hue 196.4. An sRGB primary boundary, and the ceiling of the family.
  • Aquamarine, #7fffd4. L* 92.0, C* 46.6, hue 167.9.
  • Celeste, #b2ffff. L* 95.2, C* 24.6, hue 197.9.
  • Aero blue, #c9ffe5. L* 95.8, C* 23.1, hue 162.7.
  • Light cyan, #e0ffff. L* 97.9, C* 10.5, hue 198.7.

Which of these names are actually different colours

Fifty-four names give 1,431 pairs. Compared with CIEDE2000, the mean distance is 25.42 and the median 22.52, so the family is genuinely spread out. The interesting cases are at the bottom.

  • Dark teal, #014d4e, against rich teal, #0f4d4d: dE 0.94. Below the conventional detection threshold of 1.0. These are two names for one colour, and no observer is reliably telling them apart on a screen.
  • Bondi blue against blue-green: dE 1.11. Detectable under ideal side-by-side conditions and not otherwise.
  • Dark turquoise, #00ced1, against robin egg blue, #00cccc: dE 1.17. One is named a turquoise and one a blue. They are the same colour.
  • Verdigris against light sea green: dE 2.31. Just at the recognition threshold.
  • Skobeloff against Caribbean current: dE 2.58.

Only 3 pairs of 1,431 fall below dE 2.3, and 38 fall below 5, so the vocabulary is less redundant than the gray or blue sets. But 13 of the 54 names have at least one other name within dE 3 of them, which means roughly a quarter of the teal vocabulary is doing no work that a neighbouring word does not already do. If you are picking colours rather than words, treat those clusters as single entries.

For what the thresholds mean and why 1.0 and 2.3 are conventions rather than constants, see the CIEDE2000 explainer.

How many teals does sRGB actually contain

Take the wedge of sRGB between hue 170 and 215 degrees with chroma above 8, which is a fair definition of the teal through cyan region, and sample it. A greedy walk that keeps every colour at least dE 1.0 from everything already kept yields about 7,970 distinguishable colours. Raise the threshold to 2.3, the recognition figure, and it collapses to 975.

Both are lower bounds rather than exact counts, since greedy packing is not optimal and the sample covered a ninth of the cube. But the ratio is the point: the region holds thousands of colours you could tell apart side by side, under a thousand you could recognise from memory, and 54 that anyone has bothered to name. The naming layer is roughly two orders of magnitude coarser than the discrimination layer, which is the same pattern the gray count turned up.

What colours make teal

Depends entirely on whether you are mixing light or pigment, and the two answers are not close.

On a screen, teal is green and blue light at equal intensity with red switched off. #008080 is literally that: 128 green, 128 blue. Equal parts green and blue light gives cyan, and teal is cyan at half brightness. This is additive mixing, and it is why the family ladder is a lightness ladder.

In paint, the reliable route is blue plus green, or more practically blue plus yellow to make a green and then more blue. The subtractive version is much less predictable, because real pigments absorb across broad bands rather than clean channels. Our color mixing chart covers the geometric-mean model that predicts pigment results better than naive averaging, and what color do two colors make works through the general case.

To darken a teal without muddying it, reduce lightness while holding hue near 196 degrees rather than adding black, which drags chroma down faster than lightness. That is the monochromatic scale technique, and given that the whole teal family is one hue at different lightnesses, it is unusually well suited here.

Train your eye on this region

The teal wedge is the hardest part of the spectrum to judge, for a reason the numbers above make plain: the names encode lightness while people think they encode hue, so the vocabulary actively misleads you.

  • Hue sort strips lightness out and leaves only hue, which is exactly the axis the teal vocabulary hides. The cyan region is where most people’s ordering falls apart.
  • Hex asks you to read a colour and name its code. Teals are a good test because the green and blue channels are close, and small imbalances between them move the hue more than you expect.
  • Match scores you with the same CIEDE2000 implementation used for every number in this article.
  • The main color memory game shows a colour, takes it away, and asks you to find it again. Cyans drift toward the green side on recall for most players, which connects to how colour memory degrades.

Related reading

Method

The 54 names are the CSS named colours in the cyan to green region plus the teal, turquoise and aqua names that recur across mainstream shade references with a settled hex value. Where a name has both an American and a British spelling it is counted once. Family tags were assigned by the name itself, not by the measurement, so that the measurement could test the vocabulary rather than confirm it. All values were converted from sRGB to CIELAB under a D65 white point using the standard IEC 61966-2-1 transfer function, and all 1,431 pairs were compared with CIEDE2000 using the same implementation the site uses to score gameplay. Chroma is the CIELAB C* value and hue is the angle in the a*b* plane. The lightness decomposition holds two of the three CIELAB coordinates at the source centroid and moves the third to the target centroid, so the two components do not sum to 100 percent; CIEDE2000 is not additive across its terms. Percentages are each component measured against the full centroid distance. The distinguishability walk samples every red value and every third green and blue value, then keeps the next colour that is at least the stated threshold from all kept colours, which gives a lower bound rather than an optimal packing. Thresholds of 1.0 and 2.3 are the conventional detection and recognition figures for patch comparison and do not transfer to gradients.

← All articles