Yellow colors: lemon, gold and mustard
Yellow on the OKLCH wheel
Yellow sits around the 100° to 125° region of the OKLCH wheel in this site's rules, with a looser edge from about 85° to 100° that counts as yellow only when the color is light enough. Pure sRGB Yellow lands near 110°. Its neighbors are orange toward the warm side and green toward the cool side, and the transitions are gradual, so chartreuse-like colors can reasonably be placed in either direction.
The same lightness rule that sorts oranges applies here: below an OKLCH lightness of about 0.58, hues in the 85° to 100° range become brown instead. Yellows beyond 100° stay yellow at any lightness, which is why dark olives are counted in this family. The approximate angles are a classification choice, so expect borderline cases.
Why yellow is so light
Yellow is the lightest hue in sRGB. The fully saturated Yellow has an OKLCH lightness of about 0.97 and chroma around 0.21, which means nearly the full brightness range of a screen is already spent. There is simply no dark vivid yellow: darken it and the chroma collapses, passing through Mustard and ending at olive.
Tints are pale cream and butter shades such as Banana, which barely differ from white in lightness and rely on a slight warm cast. Because of this narrow headroom, yellow scales tend to look uneven if built in HSL. A perceptual space such as OKLCH, which you can explore in the picker, spaces the steps more evenly.
Accessibility and typical uses
Yellow draws attention faster than most hues, so it is used for highlights, caution signs, ratings stars and sticky-note effects. As a background it supports dark text beautifully: Yellow against black reaches about 19.6:1, among the strongest pairings available.
As text on white, yellow fails badly. Gold has about 1.4:1 against white and the pure hue about 1.1:1, so never use light yellow for body text, thin icons or borders on a white page. Yellow is generally visible to people with red-green color blindness, and it is often the color that stays distinguishable when others merge, but yellow versus pale green can be hard to tell apart. Try your own combinations in the contrast checker and browse contrast pairs.
Yellow also needs care in dark mode and next to photos. On a dark surface it glows and is usually safe, but a large field of saturated yellow can be tiring to look at, so many designs use a muted gold or mustard for big areas and keep the bright lemon tones for small highlights, such as a badge or a marker.
Yellow names worth knowing
Look at Lemon, Gold, Saffron and Mustard. Yellow is frequently tied to optimism and attention, and also to caution, although associations differ between cultures; the yellow color meaning guide gives a balanced overview. Back at the library root, the all colors hub lists every family, and the tool comparison hub can help you choose software to build a yellow-led brand palette.