Cielo#00DFFF, a cool brilliant turquoise
Cielo in RGB, HSL, OKLCH & more
Ready to ship: every line pastes straight into your codebase, and the whole file copies at once.
ART is Rhapsody's perceptual model. How ART works
Why is it called Cielo?
Cielo's meaning, origin, and pronunciation, with sources.
Anchor: A37 · one of the 72 anchor hues of ART
Origin: Spanish and Italian, from Latin
Meaning: "Sky; heaven," both senses, undivided
Word: cielo (Spanish)
Spanish SYEH-loh · /ˈsjelo/ — Italian CHEH-loh · /ˈtʃɛːlo/ — one word, two musics
Latin caelum, "sky, heavens" → Spanish and Italian cielo, and French ciel. The same root gives English celestial.
Neither Spanish nor Italian ever split "sky" from "heaven," so cielo carries a faint theological shimmer that English "sky blue" lacks. It doubles as a term of affection, too: mi cielo, roughly "my darling."
Where caelum itself came from is uncertain. An ancient popular explanation tied it to caelare, "to engrave," the sky as an engraved vault. Which is charming, and is folklore.
The real story is the handoff. Neither Spanish nor Italian uses cielo as its word for blue. That job belongs to azul and azzurro, which are Persian words that arrived through Arabic. These languages own their sky and borrowed its color; Cielo and Azure, eight anchors apart, are the two halves of that sentence.
RAE s.v. cielo; Treccani s.v. cielo; etymonline s.v. celestial. Dictionary + scholarly sources; no native-speaker review.
Shades of Cielo, lighter and darker
For hover states, washed backgrounds, and dark surfaces that still read as #00DFFF. 13 steps, spaced evenly by eye, with the color itself sitting at its natural depth, cielo-300.
Tints (light surfaces; dark text passes on every one)
Midtones (the color at full strength, for brand & accent work)
Shades (dark surfaces; light text passes on every one)
Most tools mix. Rhapsody measures.
Paste any color. The whole system comes back, contrast-checked before you see it.
The window on the right was generated from #00DFFF, like this whole page.
Is Cielo accessible? Contrast with white & black
Strong contrast makes your work readable by everyone, and meets the WCAG standard accessibility law points at. AA is the floor; AAA is the tier worth aiming for in body text. Black text on #00DFFF clears WCAG AAA. Every strip below is one surface, and the marks are the steps that reach AAA on it.
Rows are text, columns are background · 68 of 210 pairings reach WCAG 2.2 AAA, shown here.
Ship the audit, not screenshots.
Run #00DFFF against the colors you actually ship, every pairing and any target, and export it: exact ratios, the AA tier, APCA, in one file.
The audit on the right was calibrated from #00DFFF, like this whole page.
Cielo in CMYK: one value for files, one per press
This color shifts further than a press run can hold, so expect a visible difference. The pairs below show where each standard lands.
In CMYK, #00DFFF is . That is the value design tools and file formats use when no press is involved.
On press (what each standard prints)
shifts ΔE00 6.9, 2.7× the 2.5 a run varies by
shifts ΔE00 7.8, 3.1× the 2.5 a run varies by
shifts ΔE00 7.2, 2.9× the 2.5 a run varies by
shifts ΔE00 7.9, 3.2× the 2.5 a run varies by
shifts ΔE00 6.7, 2.7× the 2.5 a run varies by
Press values computed through the ICC characterization data each standard proofs against. Each CMYK above is the closest that standard can get.
No surprises at the printer.
Run any color through the major press standards: FOGRA51, GRACoL, Japan Color, FOGRA39. It's coming soon. Create a free account and you'll get a note the moment it's live.
The strip shows this page's tints and shades on screen, then through a standard GRACoL 2013 conversion.
Colors similar to Cielo
"Sky; heaven," both senses, undivided
Here are other colors similar to Cielo along with accessible text pairings and whether or not they're print-safe. Explore The Turquoises
| Neon Blue | Neon Blue | #04D9FF | black text · AAA | ✕ shifts on press |
| Anqas | Anqas | #00EAFF | black text · AAA | ✕ shifts on press |
| Peacock | Peacock | #00D4FF | black text · AAA | ✕ shifts on press |
| Aqua Blue | Aqua Blue | #02D8E9 | black text · AAA | ✕ shifts on press |
| Bright Sky Blue | Bright Sky Blue | #02CCFE | black text · AAA | ✕ shifts on press |
| Kyanos | Kyanos | #00F4FF | black text · AAA | ✕ shifts on press |
| Robin'S Egg | Robin'S Egg | #6DEDFD | black text · AAA | ✕ shifts on press |
| Cerulean | Cerulean | #00C9FF | black text · AAA | ✕ shifts on press |
| Bright Light Blue | Bright Light Blue | #26F7FD | black text · AAA | ✕ shifts on press |
| Scooter | Scooter | #2EBFD4 | black text · AAA | ! within tolerance |
| Turquoise Blue | Turquoise Blue | #06B1C4 | black text · AAA | ✓ prints exactly |
| Shakespeare | Shakespeare | #4EABD1 | black text · AAA | ✓ prints exactly |
| Pacific Blue | Pacific Blue | #009DC4 | black text · AA | ✓ prints exactly |
| Eastern Blue | Eastern Blue | #1E9AB0 | black text · AA | ✓ prints exactly |
| Bondi Blue | Bondi Blue | #0095B6 | black text · AA | ✓ prints exactly |
| Boston Blue | Boston Blue | #3B91B4 | black text · AA | ✓ prints exactly |
Colors that go with Cielo
The complementary color, straight across the wheel, is a warm bold magenta #C8486F. Rhapsody's pick is the split complement, just to one side of it, a livelier pair.
The accent is for the moments that need attention, the harmony for the ones that need calm; the neutral carries the text and surfaces in between.
Take Cielo with you
The work on this page doesn't stay here. Save a card and the color arrives in your file, your deck or your board already decided.
Your system is already built.
Rhapsody built it before you even asked: the scale, the neutrals, the utilities, every pairing calibrated.
This page's whole theme is built from one color. Palette does the same for yours: every step calibrated, every pairing checked, press included.
Every color on this page was calibrated, not mixed.
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