What colors are Tuscan?

Terracotta, ochre, raw and burnt sienna, umber, olive, cypress green, grey pietra serena sandstone, and pale travertine and stucco cream. They are the colors of the local clay, stone and vegetation rather than a chosen scheme.

What is the main Tuscan color?

Terracotta, around #C67B5C. It is the fired clay of the roof tiles, and it is the color the whole palette is usually built outward from.

Why are Tuscan colors so muted?

Because they come from iron oxide pigments, which are inherently low in chroma. Measured in OKLCH the ten shades on this page average 0.068 chroma against 0.108 for this site's color catalog as a whole, and none exceeds 0.122.

Is Tuscan the same as terracotta?

No. Terracotta is one color in it, and the page for that single shade is at /colors/terracotta/. Tuscan is the whole set, including the greens and the pale stone that give the terracotta something to sit against.

Which Tuscan colors work for text?

Only the dark ones. Cypress reaches 9.5:1 against white and umber 7.9:1, both clearing WCAG AA. Terracotta at 3.29:1 is limited to large text or fills, and travertine and stucco cream, at 1.45:1 and 1.27:1, are backgrounds only.

Tuscan colors: the palette of terracotta, ochre and cypress

Palettes built around tuscan. Click any swatch to copy its hex code.

The Tuscan palette is what a landscape looks like when its buildings are made of it: fired clay roofs, ochre stucco, grey sandstone, olive and cypress. Every color in it came out of the ground within sight of the walls it ended up on. Hex codes and matching four-color palettes below.

Tuscan color values

#C67B5Crgb(198, 123, 92)

Color spaces of #c67b5c
RGB	198	123	92
HSL	18°	48%	57%
HSV	18°	54%	78%
CMYK	0.00	0.38	0.54	0.22
XYZ	32.3055	26.9473	13.6231
Yxy	26.9473	0.4433	0.3698
CIE-Lab	58.9255	25.9840	29.1508
Hunter Lab	51.9108	20.2415	20.7779
OKLCH	65.6%	0.104	43.0°

#C67B5C is 198 red, 123 green and 92 blue. Its red channel carries the most of it. The nearest of the 216 web safe colors is #CC6666.

CIE-Lab, XYZ and Yxy are measured against D65, the white point sRGB itself is defined against. Hunter Lab uses the original illuminant C constants, which is what paint and plastics specifications quote, so the two Lab rows are not directly comparable. CMYK is the plain arithmetic conversion: real ink values depend on the press, the paper and the profile.

Base numbers
Base	Red	Green	Blue
Binary	11000110	01111011	01011100
Octal	306	173	134
Decimal	198	123	92
Hex	C6	7B	5C

#c67b5c mixed with black

Ten even steps of the classic shade ramp, worked out in RGB, which is how the term has always been defined and how other references list it. The OKLCH scale further down this page answers a different question: it steps by equal perceived amounts, so its values are not the same.

#C67B5C
#B26E52
#9E6249
#8A5640
#764937
#633D2E
#4F3124
#3B241B
#271812
#130C09
#000000

#c67b5c mixed with white

The tint ramp, by the same rule in the other direction.

#C67B5C
#CB886C
#D1957C
#D7A28C
#DCAF9D
#E2BDAD
#E8CABD
#EDD7CE
#F3E4DE
#F9F1EE
#FFFFFF

Channel shares

Red47.9%
Green29.8%
Blue22.3%

Color schemes

Turned in OKLCH rather than HSL, so every member keeps the lightness and chroma of the original instead of one of them arriving washed out.

Complementary

#C67B5C
#379EBF

Triadic

#C67B5C
#4CA57F
#8888CF

Analogous

#C67B5C
#B78643
#C8757F

Monochromatic

#4F1900
#793516
#9F5739
#C67B5C
#EEA080
#FFD1BF
#FFF6F3

#c67b5c on black and on white

The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog. 6.39:1

The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog. 3.29:1

Body text needs 4.5:1 to meet AA and large text needs 3:1, so a ratio tells you which of the two backgrounds this color can be read on, and at what size.

CSS for #c67b5c

color: #c67b5c;
background-color: #c67b5c;
border: 3px solid #c67b5c;
box-shadow: 1px 1px 3px 2px #c67b5c;
text-shadow: 4px 4px 2px rgba(198, 123, 92, 0.8);

/* Perceptually even, and what a modern stylesheet wants */
color: oklch(65.6% 0.104 43.0);

The OKLCH form is the same color stated so that lightening or darkening it moves by an amount the eye agrees with. Every current browser understands it.

Named shades and close relatives

The palette is a geology report

Most named palettes are a mood. This one is a material list. Terracotta is literally "baked earth" in Italian - clay fired until the iron in it oxidises red. Ochre, raw sienna, burnt sienna and umber are all iron oxide pigments dug out of the same region, and two of them are named after the places they came from: sienna after Siena, umber after Umbria. Pietra serena, the grey-blue sandstone in every Florentine doorway, is quarried a few kilometres outside the city.

That shared origin is why the colors agree with each other. They are not a designer's selection of things that happen to look good together; they are variations on one chemistry, seen under one sky. Olive and cypress complete it because those are the two plants that grow in the same soil.

Why it never looks garish

Because it physically cannot. Iron oxide pigments are muted by nature, and the numbers bear it out: the ten shades above average a chroma of 0.068 in OKLCH, against 0.108 across this site's whole color catalog, and none of them passes 0.122. There is no neon in the ground.

This is the useful part when borrowing the palette. Reach for a saturated terracotta and the scheme stops reading as Tuscan and starts reading as autumn clip art. The restraint is not stylistic taste, it is the actual constraint the original materials imposed - which is also why the palette survives being used at large sizes across a whole wall or a whole page.

Using it, and where the text goes

The structure is three bands: pale stone for the ground, warm earth for the mass, and one dark green for the vertical. Drop the green and the scheme goes flat and sandy, which is the most common way this palette is got wrong - cypress is doing more work than its share of the area suggests.

For text, only the dark end is usable. Cypress reaches 9.5:1 against white and umber 7.9:1, so both clear WCAG AA comfortably. The pale end does not come close: travertine manages 1.45:1 and stucco cream 1.27:1, so they are backgrounds and nothing else. Terracotta itself, at 3.29:1, is a fill or a large heading, never body copy. Check any pair you plan to ship in the contrast checker, and see the individual shades on the terracotta, umber and olive pages.

Contrast and readability

The contrast checker reports every level for a given pair and suggests the nearest passing shade on the same hue. The color picker builds this same scale from any color you paste in.

Tuscan color questions

What colors are Tuscan?: Terracotta, ochre, raw and burnt sienna, umber, olive, cypress green, grey pietra serena sandstone, and pale travertine and stucco cream. They are the colors of the local clay, stone and vegetation rather than a chosen scheme.
What is the main Tuscan color?: Terracotta, around #C67B5C. It is the fired clay of the roof tiles, and it is the color the whole palette is usually built outward from.
Why are Tuscan colors so muted?: Because they come from iron oxide pigments, which are inherently low in chroma. Measured in OKLCH the ten shades on this page average 0.068 chroma against 0.108 for this site's color catalog as a whole, and none exceeds 0.122.
Is Tuscan the same as terracotta?: No. Terracotta is one color in it, and the page for that single shade is at /colors/terracotta/. Tuscan is the whole set, including the greens and the pale stone that give the terracotta something to sit against.
Which Tuscan colors work for text?: Only the dark ones. Cypress reaches 9.5:1 against white and umber 7.9:1, both clearing WCAG AA. Terracotta at 3.29:1 is limited to large text or fills, and travertine and stucco cream, at 1.45:1 and 1.27:1, are backgrounds only.

Related colors: taupe, brown, tan, sand, clay, umber. See every shade on the colors index.

#985F2F

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