What makes a color pastel
A pastel is a color with high lightness and low-to-moderate saturation, as if a lot of white had been mixed in. The swatches here all have an OKLab lightness between about 0.85 and 0.96, which keeps them in the same visual weight, so any combination of them looks balanced.
Pastel palettes that work
Because pastels share a lightness, the risk is not clashing but blandness. Some ways to keep a pastel palette lively:
- Use one deeper anchor color, such as navy, charcoal or a dark version of one of the pastels, for text and outlines.
- Pick pastels from three or four hue groups, not all of them.
- Add white space: pastels look cleaner next to pure white or a warm off-white.
Text on pastels
Every pastel here needs dark text. White text on a pastel almost never reaches the 4.5:1 contrast needed for normal-size text, and the "Aa" figures show black text winning on every swatch. Use pastels for backgrounds, cards and illustrations, not for small text itself.
By hue
For larger ranges, see pastel pink, pastel green, pastel yellow and mint green. To generate a fresh pastel set, set the color palette generator to a light, soft mood.