Colors / Purple
shades of purple
From 271° to 300°, where blue gives way to magenta.
The shade ramp
Same hue and saturation, brightness falling from near-white to near-black. This is what most people mean by “shades of purple”.
The tint ramp
Same hue and brightness, saturation climbing from almost gray to full strength. Saturation is the channel players misjudge most often, because a washed-out purple and a vivid one carry the same name.
Across the range
Everything the eye files under purple, sampled from 271° to 300°. Two colors at opposite ends of this strip still share one word.
Named purples
- Violet
#7F00FF - Lavender
#E6E6FA - Plum
#8E4585 - Amethyst
#9966CC - Mauve
#E0B0FF
Why purple is hard to remember
Purple darkens more convincingly than most hues, which makes brightness the channel people misjudge here. A light purple is read and stored as 'lavender' and a dark one as 'plum' — two different words for one hue, and the words carry the brightness rather than the memory.
Off Colors shows you a color for five seconds and asks you to rebuild it. It tells you which channel you missed and by how much.
Test your color memory