Green colors: from lime to forest
Green's range on the hue wheel
Green is a mid-width band of the wheel. In the OKLCH classification used here it spans roughly 125° to 168°, between yellow and teal. The pure sRGB green Green sits near 142°, and most of what we call leaf, grass and emerald fall close by. The limits are approximations, and lime-leaning greens near the yellow edge or minty greens near the teal edge are open to debate.
Unlike the warm families, green keeps its identity at every lightness: there is no rule that turns dark greens into another family. A near-black forest green stays here, which makes the family broad in lightness as well as in hue. The wider library is indexed on the colors hub.
Lightness, chroma and gamut
Green keeps high chroma at far higher lightness than blue or red can. The brightest primary reaches chroma near 0.29 at a lightness of about 0.87, a very bright and slightly harsh result that few brand palettes use unmodified. Pull the chroma down and lightness with it and you get calmer tones such as Mint and Sage.
Dark greens are less saturated but still rich: Forest Green has a lightness around 0.34 and chroma near 0.10. Tints move toward pastel mint and shades toward pine. Because the eye is sensitive to green, small chroma changes are quite visible, so try steps in the OKLCH picker before committing to a scale.
Interface roles, contrast and color blindness
Green is the near-universal cue for success, confirmation, availability and go states. It also anchors brands around nature, health and finance. Because status green is so common, keep the same green for the same meaning across a product.
Contrast depends strongly on which green. Emerald gets about 4.2:1 on white, a hair under AA for body text, and Jade only about 3.1:1, which is fine for large text and icons but not for paragraphs. Bright lime shades pass only against black. The bigger concern is color blindness: red and green are the pair most often confused by viewers with deuteranopia or protanopia, so a green tick and a red cross should differ by shape, not only by hue. The contrast checker shows ratios for any pair, and the pair library has precomputed ones.
Greens are also where gradients and charts most often go wrong. Because the eye resolves many steps of green, a ramp that jumps too coarsely looks banded, and a ramp built in a non-perceptual space can show an uneven bright patch in the middle. Sequential map and heatmap scales usually run light to dark green, with lightness doing the work so the chart still reads in greyscale. Keep the hue fairly constant and let lightness carry the data.
Notable greens
Explore Emerald, Jade, Mint, Sage and Forest Green. Green is often connected with growth, nature and permission in many Western contexts, although it can have different meanings elsewhere; the green color meaning guide discusses these links. For comparing palette software, see the comparison hub.