A colour that has been softened toward grey — less intense than its purest, most vivid version.
Colourwise classifies a colour as muted when HSV saturation is below 40%.
Muted is not the same as pale — a muted colour can still be quite dark (a muted plum), whereas pastel specifically implies high lightness too.
Dusty rose and sage green are muted colours.
'How do I mute a colour?' is one of the most common practical colour-mixing questions — see the mixing guide.
Colourwise calls a colour muted when its HSV saturation is under 40%. A measurement-based description would be low chroma for the colour's lightness: the reflectance curve of a muted surface is shallow, returning a fair amount of light at every wavelength instead of concentrating it in one part of the spectrum. Mixing a pigment with its complement or with grey flattens the curve in exactly that way.
| Colour | HSV saturation | CIELAB L* | Label |
|---|---|---|---|
| Dusty Rose #c08081 | 33% | 60.1 | Muted |
| Sage Green #9caf88 | 22% | 69.1 | Muted |
| Eggplant #614051 | 34% | 31.4 | Muted |
| Terracotta #e2725b | 60% | 60.7 | Neither |
| Scarlet #ff2400 | 100% | 54.6 | Vivid |
Eggplant is muted at 34% saturation and dark at L* 31.4, which a pastel can never be. Terracotta, at 60%, is neither muted nor vivid: most earthy, lived-in colours sit in that unlabelled middle, and describing them as muted undersells how much colour they carry on a wall.
How this was calculated: HSV saturation of each catalogue HEX value against the classifier's lines: under 40% is muted, 70% and over is vivid.
A muted scheme is planned from a screen and painted in matt emulsion.
The finish mutes the colour a second time, and the walls come out greyer than the palette. Choose one step more colourful than looks right on screen, or check a painted sample.
Muted colours are used to encode categories in a chart or a map.
Low-chroma colours sit close together, and fewer of them can be told apart reliably than vivid ones, particularly by readers with a colour-vision deficiency.