CSS Colors: MintCream, HoneyDew, & PeachPuff

Nail polish names are fun — Opi’s pastel green is Read My Palm and a darker green is Jade is the New Black, and Essie’s hot pink is Fiesta. Web browsers have some inspired names for colors, too. Sure, the old standbys are there — red, blue, green, grey, and black — but web browsers actually have a built-in vocabulary of more than 140 named colors. There’s MintCream, Honeydew, MistyRose, PeachPuff and BlanchedAlmond. And each one can be used instead of the hex code in your CSS. For example, you can use Tomato in your CSS instead of the hex value #FF6342. Or SeaGreen instead of #2E8B57.

The real plus of color names is that they’re really easy to remember and use on the fly. I don’t use named colors in every project, but when I do, I always appreciate the clever, descriptive color names. Even though there are only 140+ named colors, it’s still possible to come up with some pleasing color palettes. You can see my favorites below. I’ve included the hex color values for each named color, as the hex codes are useful when you want to use a named color in Photoshop…

You’ll notice I left out quite a lot of colors. Unfortunately, they just didn’t fit in very nicely with my color groupings, but they are perfectly good colors all the same. If you’re interested in learning more about CSS named colors, check out some of these very thorough resources:

• W3C Schools
• 147 Colors
• Wrrrld Wide Web
• Color Schemer