Red colors: hue range, shades and practical use
Where red sits on the hue wheel
Red is the family that straddles the zero point of the OKLCH hue wheel. On this site a color counts as red when its hue angle falls roughly between 350° and 45°, so the band wraps around 0° and reaches almost as far as the start of orange. Pure sRGB red, Red, lands near 29°, which is a little toward orange from where many people expect it. Those limits are approximate, because hue boundaries are a modelling choice and not a physical fact.
Two carve-outs keep the family tidy. Very light colors in this angle range are filed under pink, and dark, muted ones are filed under brown. What remains is the saturated, mid-lightness core most people mean by red, from cool crimsons on the pink side to warm vermilions on the orange side. The full set is on the all colors hub.
How lightness and chroma change red
Red is one of the most chromatic hues in sRGB, with chroma reaching about 0.26 at a mid lightness of roughly 0.63. That peak is the reason a fully saturated red feels loud on a screen. Lighten it and the chroma has to fall, so tints slide quickly toward salmon and blush. Darken it and you get the wine and oxblood range, such as Maroon, where the color is still clearly red but much quieter.
Muted reds are easiest to get by lowering chroma while keeping lightness steady, which gives brick, terracotta and dusty rose tones that sit well beside natural materials. If you need a ladder of tints and shades for one red, the OKLCH picker lets you move lightness and chroma separately and watch the sRGB limit as you go.
Using red in interfaces and brands
In product design red is the conventional signal for errors, destructive actions and urgent badges, which means it carries meaning even before anyone reads the label. Reserve it for those jobs if you can, and when red also appears as brand color, make sure the two uses are visually distinct so a logo is never mistaken for an alert.
Contrast needs care. Pure Red reaches only about 4.0:1 against white, short of the 4.5:1 WCAG AA target for body text, while it manages about 5.3:1 against black. Deeper reds such as Crimson clear 9:1 on white. Red and green are also the pair most affected by common color vision deficiencies, so never let red versus green be the only difference in a chart or form state; add an icon, a label or a pattern. Test your own pairs in the contrast checker or browse ready-made contrast pages.
Well-known reds in the library
Good starting points are Scarlet, Coral, Salmon and Maroon, each with its own page of conversions, tints and shades. Red is often linked with energy, warning and warmth in Western branding, though those associations vary by culture and context; the red color meaning guide goes through them with appropriate caution, and the color meaning hub covers the rest. Neighboring families to try next are orange and pink. If you are choosing a tool to build a palette around red, the comparison hub lays out the options.