Shades of Peach

What this tool does

Peach is a soft, pale blend of pink and orange, gentle and warm, the colour of the fruit's skin. It is one of the calmest, most welcoming colours there is, which is exactly why it is easy to overuse and tricky to balance. You usually need a slightly deeper peach for contrast and a paler one for backgrounds, without losing that soft glow.

That is what this does. You give it a peach, and it builds the whole run of that colour in even steps, each with its HEX, RGB, HSL, and HSV codes ready to copy. Below the tool there is a reference of the named peaches and the colour's recent turn in the spotlight.

How to use it

1. Set your peach. The tool starts on a peach with its Hex shown. Swap in your own using Change Color or the Color Picker, or enter a hex directly.
2. Choose the count. The Color Shades field sets how many shades appear, ten by default. More steps make a gentler gradient.
3. Grab what you need. HEX, RGB, HSL, and HSV sit next to each shade, ready to copy.

Peach is already a pale, warm pastel, so its lighter steps turn quickly to cream and near-white, while the deeper steps move toward apricot and soft terracotta. The deeper steps are often the more useful ones for contrast.

How it works

The tool runs on TinyColor, a colour library that works out the lighter and darker versions of a colour cleanly. It takes your peach, walks it toward white on one side and black on the other, spaces the steps evenly, and writes each one out in the four code formats.

Since peach starts soft and pale, the lighter end of its range warms gently into cream, and the darker end gains enough strength to read as apricot. That gives you a quiet, warm spread to build a palette from, with the deeper steps doing the work that the pale ones are too gentle for.

The fruit, and a recent moment

Peach the colour comes straight from the peach, the soft fruit first grown in eastern China thousands of years ago, whose famous fuzz is actually a coat of tiny hairs that protect it. The colour is simply that warm, pale pinky-orange of the fruit's skin, and it has long carried the fruit's gentle, wholesome associations.

Peach had a notable recent moment. In 2024, Pantone, whose colour standards the design world follows, named Peach Fuzz its Colour of the Year, describing it as a velvety, nurturing tone chosen for warmth, comfort, and a sense of caring for one another. The pick captured what peach does best: it is soft, cosy, and a little nostalgic, the colour equivalent of a warm welcome.

The named peaches, with hex codes

Peach lives at the pale, warm end of the spectrum. Here are useful reference points, with a hex for each.

• Peach (#FFE5B4): a soft, pale pinky-orange, the everyday peach.
• Peach Puff (#FFDAB9): the standard web peach, a gentle, slightly creamier tone.
• Peach Fuzz (#FFBE98): Pantone's 2024 shade, a touch deeper and more saturated.
• Apricot (around #FBCEB1): a warm, slightly richer cousin.
• Light Salmon (#FFA07A): deeper and pinker, near the edge of peach territory.

The thing to notice is just how soft these are. Peach barely raises its voice, which is its whole charm, but it also means a hex matters: the difference between a creamy peach and a richer apricot is small in numbers but clear to the eye.

Where peach works

Peach is the colour of warmth and comfort. Its softness makes it feel nurturing and unthreatening, which is why it suits wellness and skincare brands, weddings, and any design going for a gentle, welcoming, slightly vintage mood. It carries a hint of the 1980s and of soft, pared-back luxury, so it reads as both cosy and quietly stylish.

Like most pale colours, peach works best in a supporting role. It is too soft to carry text or anchor a layout on its own, so it shines as a warm background or surface, with something deeper handling contrast. The deeper steps from this tool, the apricots and soft terracottas, give you that partner in the same warm family.

Building a palette from your peach

Peach is a natural background colour, so build outward from it. Use a pale peach as a soft surface, a deeper apricot or terracotta for contrast and text, and the mid steps for buttons and accents, keeping the whole thing in one warm family for a calm, cohesive look.

For a colour accent, peach sits opposite light blue on the wheel, so a soft sky blue or teal gives a fresh, balanced contrast. It also pairs sweetly with sage and mint green, cream, gold, and its warm neighbours coral and apricot. The one rule is gentleness: peach's charm is its softness, so a loud, saturated accent can easily overpower it.

Questions people ask

What colour is peach?

A soft, pale blend of pink and orange, named after the fruit's skin. It is one of the gentlest warm colours, lighter and softer than coral and far paler than orange.

What is the hex code for peach?

Peach commonly sits around #FFE5B4, and the closest named web colour is "peachpuff" (#FFDAB9). Pantone's 2024 Peach Fuzz is #FFBE98. For an exact match, use a specific hex.

What is the difference between peach and coral?

Peach is much paler and softer, while coral is brighter and more saturated. Both are warm pink-orange colours, but peach is the gentle pastel and coral is the lively one.

Can I use my own peach?

Yes. Paste your exact peach in as the base, and the tool builds the lighter and darker steps of that colour, so you get a matching set for surfaces, accents, and text.

References

1. World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), CSS Color Module Level 4. https://www.w3.org/TR/css-color-4/
2. TinyColor (Brian Grinstead). Documentation. https://github.com/bgrins/TinyColor
3. Pantone, Peach Fuzz, Colour of the Year 2024. https://www.pantone.com/articles/color-of-the-year/what-is-peach-fuzz