Shades of yellow: 85 names, hex codes, and the family with no dark end

Ask someone to picture a dark yellow and watch what happens. Dark red is easy, everyone has seen a maroon car. Dark blue is so ordinary it has a job title, navy. Dark green is a paint aisle. Dark yellow produces a pause, and then usually the word mustard, which is not dark, or the word olive, which people say with a question mark in it because olive does not feel like a yellow at all.

It is a yellow. Take the CSS keyword olive, #808000, and convert it to CIELAB. The hue angle comes out at 102.9 degrees. Now take pure yellow, #ffff00, and do the same. The hue angle comes out at 102.9 degrees. Not close, not roughly, the same number to one decimal place. Olive sits at exactly the hue of yellow with the light turned down to L* 51.9. The only thing separating the two colors is how much light comes back, and English gives them unrelated names.

I collected 85 named yellows, took every yellow, gold and lemon keyword in the CSS named-color set plus the shades that recur across mainstream lists with a settled hex value, converted all of them to CIELAB and ran all 3,570 pairs through CIEDE2000. It is the same measurement I ran on the reds, the oranges, the greens, the blues, the purples and the pinks. Yellow came back with the most lopsided distribution of the seven.

Nine of the 85 named yellows fall below lightness 55. For the reds the figure is 47 out of 65. For the purples it is 60 out of 87. Yellow does not have a dark half in the way the other families do, and five of the nine names it does have down there are olive, olive drab, dark olive green, drab and army green, which is to say the dark end of yellow has been annexed by words that sound like something else entirely.

The 85 named yellows, with hex codes

Sorted by CIELAB lightness within five bands. L* is lightness on a 0 to 100 scale, C* is chroma. For reference, pure sRGB yellow sits at hue 102.9 degrees and pure sRGB red at 40.0, so everything here is in the upper half of the warm arc.

Pale, L* 93 and above

Eighteen names, and most of them have almost no color left in them. Ivory has a chroma of 7.6, which is a rounding error away from white. This band is where yellow does something no other family manages, it stays recognisably itself at lightness levels where red has already become pink and blue has already become a tint of grey.

• Ivory, #fffff0. L* 99.6, C* 7.6.
• Light yellow, #ffffe0. L* 99.3, C* 15.7.
• Cream, #fffdd0. L* 98.5, C* 22.8.
• Lemon chiffon, #fffacd. L* 97.6, C* 22.9.
• Laser lemon, #ffff66. L* 97.5, C* 73.3. Same lightness as cornsilk below it, five times the chroma.
• Cornsilk, #fff8dc. L* 97.5, C* 14.5.
• Light goldenrod yellow, #fafad2. L* 97.4, C* 20.3.
• Electric yellow, #ffff33. L* 97.2, C* 90.0.
• Yellow, #ffff00. L* 97.1, C* 96.9. The CSS keyword, and the brightest fully saturated color sRGB can produce.
• Beige, #f5f5dc. L* 95.9, C* 12.8.
• Icterine, #fcf75e. L* 95.2, C* 73.4.
• Lemon, #fff700. L* 95.1, C* 94.6.
• Chartreuse yellow, #dfff00. L* 94.8, C* 98.0. The highest chroma in the entire set.
• Cadmium yellow, #fff600. L* 94.8, C* 94.4.
• Blond, #faf0be. L* 94.5, C* 25.8.
• Mindaro, #e3f988. L* 94.3, C* 56.8.
• Key lime, #e8f48c. L* 93.3, C* 52.2.
• Canary yellow, #ffef00. L* 93.0, C* 92.5.

Light, L* 85 to 93

Thirty-one names, the largest band in the set. This is where most of the yellows people actually picture live, and it is also where the naming gets so dense that several of these are indistinguishable in practice. More on that below.

• Eggshell, #f0ead6. L* 92.7, C* 10.5.
• Lemon meringue, #f6eabe. L* 92.6, C* 23.0.
• Aureolin, #fdee00. L* 92.6, C* 92.2.
• Maize, #fbec5d. L* 92.3, C* 69.8.
• Green yellow, #adff2f. L* 92.0, C* 97.2.
• Moccasin, #ffe4b5. L* 91.7, C* 26.5.
• Flavescent, #f7e98e. L* 91.7, C* 46.5.
• Pale goldenrod, #eee8aa. L* 91.1, C* 31.8.
• Xanthic, #eeed09. L* 91.1, C* 91.0.
• Vanilla, #f3e5ab. L* 90.8, C* 30.3.
• Khaki, #f0e68c. L* 90.3, C* 45.9. The CSS keyword khaki is lighter than 56 of the 85 colors in this set, which is not what the word means anywhere outside a stylesheet.
• Banana yellow, #ffe135. L* 89.6, C* 80.6.
• Wheat, #f5deb3. L* 89.4, C* 24.1.
• Titanium yellow, #eee600. L* 89.3, C* 89.7.
• Golden yellow, #ffdf00. L* 88.9, C* 88.8.
• Jasmine, #f8de7e. L* 88.8, C* 50.1.
• Minion yellow, #f5e050. L* 88.6, C* 70.5.
• Mustard, #ffdb58. L* 88.3, C* 66.8. The answer people reach for when asked to name a dark yellow, sitting in the top eighth of the lightness scale.
• Dandelion, #f0e130. L* 88.3, C* 81.1.
• Sunflower, #ffda03. L* 87.7, C* 87.5.
• Buff, #f0dc82. L* 87.6, C* 46.8.
• Naples yellow, #fada5e. L* 87.6, C* 63.5.
• Peridot, #e6e200. L* 87.6, C* 88.5.
• Royal yellow, #fada5a. L* 87.6, C* 65.1.
• Flax, #eedc82. L* 87.5, C* 46.6.
• School bus yellow, #ffd800. L* 87.2, C* 87.3.
• Gold, #ffd700. L* 86.9, C* 87.2.
• Pear, #d1e231. L* 86.1, C* 81.2.
• Cyber yellow, #ffd300. L* 85.9, C* 86.4.
• Straw, #e4d96f. L* 85.6, C* 53.9.
• Arylide yellow, #e9d66b. L* 85.2, C* 54.9.

Core, L* 72 to 85

Twenty names. The yellows here read as deep or rich rather than dark, and the vocabulary starts borrowing: amber and mango and chrome yellow all sit within a few points of colors the orange list also claims.

• Sandstorm, #ecd540. L* 84.9, C* 72.4.
• Sunglow, #ffcc33. L* 84.3, C* 76.5.
• Tangerine yellow, #ffcc00. L* 84.2, C* 85.3.
• Safety yellow, #eed202. L* 84.1, C* 84.5.
• Citrine, #e4d00a. L* 82.7, C* 82.7.
• Jonquil, #f4ca16. L* 82.7, C* 81.2.
• Mikado yellow, #ffc40c. L* 82.3, C* 83.1.
• Saffron, #f4c430. L* 81.3, C* 74.2.
• Amber, #ffbf00. L* 81.0, C* 83.7.
• Mango, #fdbe02. L* 80.6, C* 83.0.
• Selective yellow, #ffba00. L* 79.8, C* 83.2. The colour of older European fog lamps, specified by regulation rather than by anyone’s taste.
• Yellow green, #9acd32. L* 76.5, C* 76.7.
• Chrome yellow, #ffa700. L* 75.4, C* 82.5.
• Trombone, #d2b55b. L* 74.5, C* 49.0.
• Old gold, #cfb53b. L* 74.0, C* 62.4.
• Dark khaki, #bdb76b. L* 73.4, C* 40.3.
• Earth yellow, #e1a95f. L* 73.0, C* 47.4.
• Metallic gold, #d4af37. L* 72.8, C* 62.9.
• Ecru, #c2b280. L* 72.8, C* 27.7.
• Vegas gold, #c5b358. L* 72.8, C* 48.4.

Deep gold, L* 65 to 72

Six names, and every one of them is a gold or an ochre. The word yellow has already dropped out of the vocabulary by this point and been replaced by metals and pigments.

• Marigold, #eaa221. L* 71.9, C* 72.1.
• Goldenrod, #daa520. L* 70.8, C* 69.3.
• Gamboge, #e49b0f. L* 69.5, C* 74.0.
• Satin sheen gold, #cba135. L* 68.3, C* 59.2.
• Yellow ochre, #cb9d06. L* 67.1, C* 70.4.
• Harvest gold, #da9100. L* 65.9, C* 73.3.

Dark, below L* 65

Ten names for the bottom 65 points of the lightness scale. This is the whole story of yellow in one short list.

• Dark goldenrod, #b8860b. L* 59.2, C* 63.5. The darkest color in the set that still holds a chroma above 60.
• Olive drab, #6b8e23. L* 54.7, C* 57.1.
• Dark yellow, #8b8000. L* 52.9, C* 58.4.
• Olive, #808000. L* 51.9, C* 58.1.
• Drab, #967117. L* 49.9, C* 51.3.
• Golden brown, #996515. L* 47.2, C* 51.4.
• Bronze yellow, #737000. L* 46.0, C* 52.8. The darkest name in the set with the word yellow still in it.
• Dark olive green, #556b2f. L* 42.2, C* 35.9.
• Field drab, #6c541e. L* 37.2, C* 34.4.
• Army green, #4b5320. L* 33.5, C* 30.6.

Olive is dark yellow, measured

The olive result is worth sitting with because it is so clean. Two colors, one CSS keyword each, hue angles identical to the first decimal:

• Yellow, #ffff00. L* 97.1, C* 96.9, hue 102.9.
• Olive, #808000. L* 51.9, C* 58.1, hue 102.9.

The reason is arithmetic. #808000 is #ffff00 with both active channels halved. Halving red and green together scales the color along a straight line toward black, and a line through the origin in RGB holds its chromaticity. What changes is luminance, which CIELAB reports as lightness, and chroma, which shrinks because chroma is not a ratio, it is a distance from the neutral axis and that axis converges as things get darker.

So olive is not a hue. It is a light level. Yellow at full power is called yellow, yellow at roughly a fifth of the luminance is called olive, and the language treats them as unrelated the way it treats orange and brown as unrelated. That is now two of the seven families in this series that lose their dark half to a foreign word, and the two of them are neighbours on the wheel. Between hue 40 and hue 103, roughly the arc from red to yellow, English stops naming darkness as a version of the bright color and starts issuing separate words.

Run the darkening ramp on pure yellow and you can watch the handover happen. Holding hue at 102.9 and stepping the value down:

• #ffff00, L* 97.1. Yellow.
• #cdcd00, L* 80.0. Citrine, at a stretch.
• #9b9b00, L* 62.0. Dark yellow, and nothing in the corpus is closer than ΔE 9.3, which means there is no good name for it at all.
• #828200, L* 52.6. Olive, ΔE 0.8.
• #696900, L* 42.9. Bronze yellow.
• #505000, L* 32.8. Army green.

The interesting step is the third one. At L* 62 the nearest named color in a corpus of over 500 shades is 9.3 ΔE away, an enormous gap by the standards of this data. There is a genuine hole in the vocabulary between the last real yellow and the first olive, and that hole is exactly where a word like dark yellow ought to sit if the language worked the way it does for red and blue.

Why yellow cannot be dark and vivid at the same time

The naming is downstream of a physical constraint, and the constraint is visible in the sRGB gamut. I scanned the cube and recorded the highest chroma reachable at each hue at four lightness levels:

• Yellow (hue 103): L* 30 gives C* 43, L* 50 gives 61, L* 70 gives 78, L* 90 gives 95. It climbs the whole way.
• Blue (hue 306): L* 30 gives C* 134, L* 50 gives 111, L* 70 gives 68, L* 90 gives 28. It falls the whole way.
• Red (hue 40): 76, 105, 68, 23. It peaks in the middle.
• Purple (hue 328): 80, 112, 99, 39. Also middle.

Yellow is the only one of the seven where maximum chroma and maximum lightness are the same place. Blue is its exact mirror. This is not a quirk of sRGB, it follows from how the display makes yellow: red and green phosphors both at full output, which is most of the panel’s available luminance, against blue alone which is the dimmest primary the eye has. The same asymmetry shows up in the eye itself. The photopic luminous efficiency function peaks at 555 nm, in the yellow-green, so a yellow of a given radiant power simply looks brighter than a blue of the same power. Yellow starts near the ceiling and has nowhere to go but down, and on the way down it loses chroma faster than it loses the argument about what to call it.

Which means the folk intuition is correct and for the right reason. There is no vivid dark yellow available on any normal screen or in any normal pigment set. What you get when you try is olive, and olive looks muddy not because the hue changed but because the chroma had to collapse to get down there. If you want the general version of this argument, how to read hex color codes covers why the three channels behave so differently.

The most crowded vocabulary of the seven

Squeezing 85 names into the top half of the lightness scale has a consequence. I measured naming density as the mean CIEDE2000 distance from each color to its nearest neighbour in its own family, and counted how many colors have a twin closer than ΔE 2.3, roughly the point at which a trained observer stops reliably telling two patches apart:

• Yellow: mean nearest neighbour 2.93, 47 of 85 have a twin under ΔE 2.3. That is 55 percent of the family.
• Orange: 2.81, 31 of 75, 41 percent.
• Pink: 3.17, 29 of 77, 38 percent.
• Red: 3.90, 22 of 65, 34 percent.
• Purple: 4.48, 12 of 87, 14 percent.
• Blue: 4.51, 8 of 63, 13 percent.
• Green: 4.75, 5 of 80, 6 percent.

Green has 80 names spread across 80 points of lightness and almost none of them collide. Yellow has 85 names spread across a usable band perhaps half that wide, and more than half of them have a near-duplicate. The tightest pairs are not subtle:

• Cadmium yellow #fff600 and lemon #fff700, ΔE 0.27. One unit of green channel apart.
• Gold #ffd700 and school bus yellow #ffd800, ΔE 0.32.
• Canary yellow #ffef00 and aureolin #fdee00, ΔE 0.33.
• Mango #fdbe02 and amber #ffbf00, ΔE 0.36.
• Naples yellow #fada5e and royal yellow #fada5a, ΔE 0.44. Four hex digits identical out of six.

Seventeen pairs in the set sit under ΔE 1.6. Anyone telling you they can distinguish cadmium yellow from lemon is describing a naming convention, not a visual experience, because at 0.27 the difference is well under the threshold where the CIEDE2000 formula considers two colors to be the same color. The CIEDE2000 explainer goes through what those numbers mean and why the formula needs so many correction terms to behave sensibly in exactly this region.

My own view is that this is a supply problem rather than a perception problem. Yellow is a heavily commercial colour. Paint ranges, safety standards, pigment catalogues and brand guidelines all need a yellow, and they all need a yellow that is legally or contractually distinct from someone else’s yellow. When the available space is small and the demand for distinct names is high, you get 17 pairs that nobody can tell apart. Green has plenty of room and no comparable commercial pressure, so its names stay spread out.

Yellow is old, which is part of the problem

In the standard account of how colour vocabularies develop, languages acquire basic colour terms in a fairly consistent order. Black and white come first, then red, then yellow and green, with blue arriving later and brown, orange, pink, purple and grey later still. Yellow is one of the earliest words a language gets, which means it has had the longest time to accumulate secondary vocabulary around it, and the longest time for that vocabulary to be borrowed by neighbouring regions of colour space when they needed a word.

You can see the borrowing in the list above. Khaki, ecru, buff, straw, flax, wheat and beige are all yellows by measurement and all of them arrived as names for materials rather than for colours. Gold, old gold, metallic gold, vegas gold and satin sheen gold are metals. Saffron, gamboge, aureolin, arylide and cadmium yellow are pigments. The count of names that are simply a description of a yellow is small. The family got its vocabulary secondhand, from things that happen to be that colour, which is what tends to happen when a colour term is old enough that the obvious words are already taken.

Compare the greens, where a large share of the names are structural: light green, dark green, sea green, forest green, spring green. Green had room to build a systematic vocabulary. Yellow did not, and the wider colour theory picture explains why the wheel positions that get squeezed are always the ones near the top of the lightness range.

What this means if you are trying to get good at colour

The practical consequence of everything above is that yellow is the family where your eye gets the least useful feedback. In red or blue, lightness carries most of the signal, and lightness is the dimension human vision is best at. If you are off on a blue you are usually off in a direction you can name, too dark or too light. In yellow the lightness range is compressed into a narrow band, so almost all the discriminating information lives in chroma and in small hue shifts toward green or orange, and those are the two dimensions people read worst.

This shows up when people play. Yellow targets produce a distinctive error pattern, guesses that are close in lightness and wrong in saturation, and players tend to overshoot chroma because the memory of a yellow is more vivid than the yellow was. The main color memory game shows a target, takes it away and asks you to rebuild it, which makes that overshoot easy to see because you get the ΔE back on every guess. Hex Guesser is the sharper tool for this particular family, since typing the channel values forces you to commit to a red-to-green ratio rather than nudging a picker until it feels right, and the ratio is the whole game in yellow. Name That Color is the one that will punish you for the crowding described above, because it will happily ask you to separate colors that are 0.3 ΔE apart.

If you want the general training approach rather than the yellow-specific one, train your eye for color covers the drill structure, and warm and cool colors explains why the warm side of the wheel behaves so differently from the cool side in the first place.

How this was measured

Every hex value was converted from sRGB to CIELAB under a D65 white point, using the standard sRGB transfer function rather than a plain 2.2 gamma. Chroma is the distance from the neutral axis in the a*b* plane and hue is the angle in that plane, measured anticlockwise from the positive a* axis, so pure sRGB red lands at 40.0 degrees and pure sRGB yellow at 102.9. All 3,570 pairs were compared with CIEDE2000 using the Sharma, Wu and Dalal reference implementation, with all three weighting factors set to 1.

The gamut figures come from scanning the sRGB cube at a step of 3 on each channel, collecting every sample within 3 degrees of the target hue angle, and taking the maximum chroma inside each 10-point lightness band. The nearest-neighbour figures for the other six families were computed from the same name lists published in the earlier articles in this series, so the comparisons are like for like.

Two judgement calls are worth flagging. First, I put olive, olive drab, dark olive green, drab, field drab and army green in the yellow set rather than the green set, on the grounds that their hue angles run from 82.9 to 121.6 degrees, a band that straddles pure yellow at 102.9 rather than pure green at 136.0. Most published shade lists file them under green. That disagreement is the article. Second, several names here also appear in the orange list, amber and mango and marigold among them, because the two families genuinely overlap between hue 70 and hue 85. Removing the shared names lifts yellow’s floor further, it does not change the shape of the distribution.

The short version

• Yellow has no dark end. Nine of 85 named yellows sit below L* 55, against 47 of 65 reds and 60 of 87 purples, and five of those nine are olive or drab or army green.
• Olive is dark yellow, exactly. #808000 and #ffff00 share a CIELAB hue angle of 102.9 degrees and differ only in lightness, 51.9 against 97.1.
• Yellow is the only hue whose maximum chroma sits at its maximum lightness. It gains chroma all the way up the scale, from C* 43 at L* 30 to C* 95 at L* 90, the mirror image of blue.
• Yellow is the most crowded family in the series. 55 percent of the names have a twin closer than ΔE 2.3, against 6 percent for green, and 17 pairs sit under ΔE 1.6.
• There is a real gap in the vocabulary around L* 62, where the nearest named colour in a 500-shade corpus is 9.3 ΔE away. English never built a word for a mid-dark yellow because there was never a vivid one to name.