A muted plum with a hint of pink — paint-trade color name suggestive of velvet drapes and dim hotel bars.
Decorator’s Note A grown-up purple that often works on accent walls in libraries, dining rooms, and bedrooms. Frequently paired with brass hardware and warm white trim. In small spaces it can feel rich; in larger rooms with limited light, it can read flat.
A dusty lavender named for the houseplant Saintpaulia, native to the cloud forests of Tanzania and adjacent southeastern Kenya.
Origin Named for the genus Saintpaulia (recently reclassified within Streptocarpus). The plants were brought to European botanical attention in 1892 by Baron Walter von Saint Paul-Illaire, then a German colonial district commissioner in Tanganyika (now Tanzania), who sent specimens to his father in Germany. Botanist Hermann Wendland of the Royal Botanic Gardens in Hanover described the species and named the genus after the Saint Paul family; the species name ionantha is Greek for "violet-like".
Famous Uses Despite the common name, African violets are not closely related to true violets — they belong to the family Gesneriaceae, alongside Cape primroses (Streptocarpus) and gloxinias. They became one of the most popular houseplants in 20th-century America after Armacost & Royston Nursery in Los Angeles released cultivars beginning in the 1920s. The African Violet Society of America has held shows since 1946.
Decorator’s Note A flattering tint that often works on accent walls, painted furniture, and textile accents in bedrooms or studies. Frequently paired with cream, soft gray, and brass hardware. In rooms with strong yellow light it can drift toward gray; under daylight it reads true.
Pairs Well With Often paired with warm cream, sage green, and brushed brass. For a more contemporary palette, with charcoal gray and a single saturated accent (mustard, deep teal). Cool blue-purples alongside it tend to muddy each other.
A whisper of pink-gray, just enough hue to register as "warm". A shadow tone in cosmetic ranges.
A wine-tinted plum with the unfading character of the amaranth blossom — slow to wilt, slow to fade.
A deep, ecclesiastical violet. In American academic regalia, deep purples have long been associated with the doctoral hood trim of Law faculties.
A vivid, ink-rich violet from late-19th and early-20th-century American textile and pigment color catalogs.
From Greek "amethystos" — "not intoxicated". The gemstone was once carried as a charm against drunkenness; the color has long been associated with bishops and royalty.
Origin From Ancient Greek ἀμέθυστος (a-methystos), literally "not drunk". Greeks attributed sobriety-protecting properties to amethyst quartz, and the stone was sometimes carved into drinking cups for that reason. The color name followed the stone into Latin (amethystus), then Old French, and entered English by the 14th century.
Famous Uses In the Roman Catholic Church, the bishop's ring is traditionally set with an amethyst — by long custom rather than strict canonical requirement. Amethyst is the traditional birthstone of February and one of the historical "cardinal gems" prized in European jewelry alongside ruby, sapphire, emerald, and diamond.
Decorator’s Note A surprisingly versatile accent that flatters both warm woods (oak, walnut) and cool metals (pewter, brushed nickel). A single amethyst velvet cushion or curtain panel can add richness to a neutral room without committing to a "purple room". Under warm incandescent light it can shift toward gray.
Pairs Well With Often paired with mustard yellow, forest green, and warm cream. For a more contemporary look, with terracotta or dusty rose. Cool blue-purples (lavender, periwinkle) tend to muddy each other when combined with it.
Cultural Meaning In Western tradition, the color of episcopal authority and of February (its birthstone month). In modern marketing, often used to signal "premium but approachable" — beauty brands lean on it heavily for that reason.
A more electric amethyst — closer to neon than to gem.
A jewel-toned mauve-purple, equal parts amethyst depth and orchid softness. Pantone's Amethyst Orchid (17-3628 TCX) has appeared in several Pantone Fashion Color Trend Reports — notably for Fall 2015 and Spring/Summer 2021.
A sober, ecclesiastical amethyst — the color of a Lenten chasuble.
A vivid blue-violet — the dye-vat color halfway between blue and purple. From Spanish añil (indigo), itself from Arabic al-nīl, ultimately from Sanskrit nīla ("dark blue"). The name has long served in English and Romance-language texts as a synonym for indigo dye.
A dusty, museum-piece mauve — the lavender of a faded 1890s gown.
A serious, slightly faded violet — the velvet of an opera-house seat in low light.
A muted plum named after the diamond-pattern argyle knitwear — itself derived from the tartan of Clan Campbell of Argyll (western Scotland), which entered fashion as patterned hosiery in the 19th and early 20th centuries.
A soft, autumn-meadow purple named for the aster flower, blooming after most other plants have given up.
French and British English for "eggplant". Has long been a favored fashion-and-interiors term for the deep, near-black purple of the ripe vegetable's skin — a sophisticated alternative to plain black.
A muted, late-season purple — sharing its name with the "Autumn Purple" white-ash cultivar (Fraxinus americana "Junginger"), whose leaves turn deep wine-purple in fall before dropping.
A pale lavender with a slight pink lean — the lighter cousin of lilac, often paired with baby pink and baby blue in 1990s-2000s nursery palettes.
The vivid pinkish-purple of Barney the Dinosaur, the PBS children's television character (1992-2009). The name has become slang for any saturated kid-show purple.
Famous Uses Barney & Friends aired on PBS from 1992 to 2009, making the character's specific purple one of the most recognized hues of late-20th-century children's television.
A slightly more red-leaning variant of Barney — closer to magenta. Used in the same children's-TV / 90s-purple palette as the original.
A deep berry-red with hints of purple — the color of crushed blackberries or boysenberries. Common in 1990s textile palettes.
A deep blue-purple — sits on the boundary of indigo and violet.
A vivid blue-leaning purple — sometimes called 'electric indigo'.
An even more vivid, almost-neon blue-purple. Near-fluorescent.
A deep saturated blue-purple — sits between indigo and violet.
A vivid, electric blue-violet — saturated almost to fluorescent.
A muted, dusty blue-violet — softer than CSS BlueViolet.
CSS named color blueviolet (W3C/X11) — a vivid mid-blue-purple. One of the most saturated of the X11 violets.
Origin Added to the X11 color list in 1989 and inherited by CSS. The compound name reflects the color's position between blue and violet on the spectrum.
The Crayola color "Blue-Violet" as documented by the Crayola Wiki — a balanced mid-blue purple between Blue Violet 3 (#7366BD, an older Crayola digital swatch) and the deeper Blue Violet 1. The Crayola crayon has been in continuous production since 1949 (originally named "Violet" in the 1949 No. 48 box, renamed "Blue-Violet" in 1958).
A descriptively-named mid-blue with detectable purple in the undertone — from the casual descriptive-color naming tradition (xkcd-style color-survey names rather than an official X11 or Crayola palette).
A saturated blue-purple — leans more blue than violet.
A saturated blue-purple — vibrant, sits between indigo and violet.
A deep, dusty red-purple — named for the berry cultivar (a blackberry-raspberry-loganberry cross) developed by Rudolph Boysen in California in the 1920s.
Origin The boysenberry (Rubus ursinus × idaeus) was developed by Rudolph Boysen on his California farm in the 1920s and popularized by Walter Knott at Knott's Berry Farm. The named color followed as a fashion and food-design vocabulary.
A vivid pastel purple — the color of garden lavender flowers at peak bloom.
A more saturated bright purple — close to neon.
A vivid pink-purple — saturated and clearly artificial.
A softer, more pastel bright lilac — close to candy-floss.
A vivid lilac-purple — named for ube (Dioscorea alata), the bright purple yam used in Filipino desserts. The yam itself is much darker than this color; the name captures the cooked/flavored variant.
Famous Uses Filipino cuisine uses ube in ice cream, pastries, halo-halo, and the iconic ube halaya. The color has become a touchstone of Filipino American food culture in the 2010s-2020s.
A saturated, vivid pure violet — close to neon, brighter than CSS Violet.
A pale, high-chroma pink-lavender — lighter and more red-leaning than the Bright Lavender shades on this page. Sometimes also called "Electric Lavender" in digital color references.
A muted plum-brown — sits between aubergine and mahogany.
A dusty mauve-purple — captures the discoloration of an older bruise as it heals through purple toward yellow.
A portmanteau (blue + purple), specifically the vivid bluish-purple sometimes used as an alternative name for 'blurple' or for Crayola's blue-violet.
A deep saturated red-purple — named for the city of Byzantium (later Constantinople, now Istanbul). A more 'true' purple than the related 'Byzantine' shade.
Origin Byzantium was the original Greek colonial city founded in the 7th century BCE, later renamed Constantinople by Emperor Constantine. The named color captures the deep imperial purple that the Byzantines monopolized through their control of Tyrian purple dye production.
Famous Uses Used as a paint and fashion color name from the 19th century onward, often in luxury and ecclesiastical contexts.
Cultural Meaning Across Western design, signals empire, gravitas, religious solemnity, and old-world prestige.
All six describe positions between red and blue but at different points. Violet is the spectral end of the visible spectrum (around 380-450 nm) — a single-wavelength hue with strong blue and slight red components, around #8F00FF in screen approximation. Purple is the broader family of red-blue mixes — not spectral, but generated by simultaneous red and blue cone stimulation; CSS purple is #800080, a mid-saturation deep red-purple. Indigo is the dark blue-violet between blue and violet on Newton's rainbow, around #4B0082; many vision researchers today consider it indistinguishable from deep blue or violet. Mauve is a soft, dusty pale purple around #E0B0FF, named for the malva (mallow) flower — and historically the name of the first synthetic dye. Lilac is a pale red-leaning purple around #C8A2C8, named for the flowering shrub. Lavender is paler still and blue-leaning, around #E6E6FA in CSS, named for the herb. Rough hierarchy by depth and warmth: violet (deepest, blue-leaning) → indigo (deepest blue-violet) → purple (mid red-purple) → mauve (pale red-purple) → lilac (pale red-purple, flower-warmer) → lavender (palest, blue-leaning).
Tyrian purple (also called imperial purple or royal purple) was a dye made from the mucus of the murex sea snail, harvested at Tyre and Sidon on the eastern Mediterranean coast from around 1500 BCE. Each snail yielded only a single drop of usable dye; an estimated 10,000 to 12,000 snails were required to produce one gram of finished dye, enough to color the trim of a single garment. The harvesting, soaking, and fermentation process was foul-smelling, labor-intensive, and could not be industrialized. The result was a deep red-purple that was famously colorfast — it actually deepened with exposure to light rather than fading — making it the most prestigious textile color of antiquity. The Roman Empire restricted its use to senators and emperors; in Byzantium, only the imperial family could wear "the purple", and a child born to a reigning emperor was said to be porphyrogenitos ("born to the purple"). The dye industry collapsed with the fall of Constantinople in 1453.
In Easter 1856, an 18-year-old chemistry student named William Henry Perkin was working in his home laboratory in East London on a project for his Royal College of Chemistry mentor August Wilhelm von Hofmann: trying to synthesize quinine, the antimalarial drug, from coal-tar derivatives. The synthesis failed and produced a black sludge, which Perkin attempted to clean off with alcohol — and noticed a brilliant purple color leaching out. He recognized the dye potential, patented it later that year (at age 18) as mauveine, and within three years had built the first industrial-scale synthetic dye factory at Greenford Green. Mauveine became fashionable when Queen Victoria wore mauve to the Royal Exhibition of 1862; Empress Eugénie of France made it the dominant fashion color of the early 1860s. Perkin's accidental discovery launched the entire synthetic-dye industry and, ultimately, modern organic chemistry — including pharmaceuticals.
The association runs directly back to Tyrian purple's extreme cost in the ancient world (see above). For roughly three thousand years — from Phoenicia and Persia through Rome, Byzantium, and into the European medieval period — purple cloth was the most expensive textile a culture could produce. By Roman law (Codex Theodosianus, 4th century), wearing imperial purple was punishable by death except for the emperor and his family. The Catholic Church inherited this status symbol: bishops and cardinals wore (and wear) purple as a sign of the highest ranks below the pope. Purple liturgical vestments mark Advent and Lent, the most solemn seasons. After 1856 mauveine made the color cheap, but the prestige association stuck — through Cadbury's wrapper purple (since 1914), academic doctoral robes, Premier League and NFL team colors, and the recurring use of purple for "premium" branding in tech and luxury goods today.
Strictly: violet is a spectral color (single wavelength, 380-450 nm at the short-wavelength end of visible light), while purple is a non-spectral mix of red and blue light that the brain perceives as a hue. A monitor cannot display true spectral violet (the LCD/OLED screen mixes red and blue to approximate it), so on a computer screen the two are often visually indistinguishable. In everyday English usage the words are largely interchangeable, with "violet" tending to mean the more blue-leaning purples and "purple" the more red-leaning ones. CSS reflects this: violet is #EE82EE (a vivid pinkish-purple, weirdly not very blue-leaning at all in this case), while purple is #800080 (a mid red-purple). The technical distinction matters in physics and color science; in language, art, and design, the words function as synonyms most of the time.
For CSS-named colors (Purple, Violet, Indigo, Plum, Orchid, Medium Purple, Dark Violet, Blue Violet, Lavender, Thistle, Magenta), yes — the W3C specification fixes the exact sRGB values. For Pantone, RAL, and brand-named paints, the underlying color is defined by a physical reference and the hex values shown here are the most widely-cited public conversions, which may differ between sources by a few digits. For historical pigment and material names — Tyrian Purple, Mauveine, Byzantium, Aubergine, Anil, Amethyst Orchid — there is no single authoritative hex, and values shown represent the consensus of named-color references. Treat them as faithful approximations rather than absolutes.
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