Lime Shades
Every named color in the lime family, with computed conversions and contrast data — membership derived by computed hue, not a hand-maintained list. 88 colors shown below.
Quick facts (computed from this family's 88 members)
- Average lightness: 44%
- Average saturation: 77%
- 14 of 88 pass WCAG AA as normal text on white
- 77 of 88 pass WCAG AA as normal text on black
- Lightest named member: light khaki
- Darkest named member: dark olive
- Most saturated member: GreenYellow
The color science
Lime sits roughly 65-90°, the yellow-green transition, and is named after the citrus fruit's rind color rather than the mineral 'lime' (calcium oxide), which is an entirely unrelated word with a different etymological root. It's one of the more perceptually 'loud' hue bands because it combines yellow's high luminance with green's position near the eye's peak sensitivity, which is why safety vests and hazard equipment increasingly use lime-green ('safety yellow-green,' standardized as ANSI/ISEA 107 in the US) rather than pure yellow — testing by transportation-safety researchers has shown it's more visible in more lighting conditions, including headlights at dusk and overcast daylight. The specific ANSI/ISEA 107 fluorescent yellow-green used in modern hi-vis workwear is deliberately engineered to include a fluorescent component (re-emitting absorbed UV as visible light) rather than relying on reflectance alone, which is why properly certified hi-vis lime gear can appear to glow slightly even in overcast, low-UV conditions where a plain lime-colored fabric without the fluorescent additive would not. Fire and rescue vehicles in several countries have shifted from traditional red to this same fluorescent lime-yellow over recent decades specifically because published visibility studies found it measurably outperforms red under low-light and adverse-weather driving conditions, a genuine evidence-driven equipment change rather than a branding decision.
Common uses in design
Lime is heavily associated with early-2000s and 2020s-revival 'Y2K' digital design and with sportswear/athletic branding, where its high energy and association with fresh produce (citrus, unripe fruit) reads as vitality; it's rarely used in finance, healthcare, or luxury branding, where it reads as too casual or synthetic for the trust and gravity those categories usually want to project. Energy-drink branding is one of the heaviest users of lime across any product category, almost as a genre convention at this point. Gaming and esports branding also leans on lime heavily as a high-energy secondary accent alongside a darker primary color, capitalizing on the same visual-loudness property that makes it effective for safety equipment, just repurposed for attention-grabbing digital design instead. Tech and startup branding also cycles through lime periodically as a way of signaling disruption or newness, typically paired with black or dark gray for maximum contrast rather than with softer neutrals. That black-and-lime pairing specifically tends to read as bold and modern rather than dated, unlike some other high-saturation accent trends that age less gracefully over a multi-year product lifespan.
Accessibility notes
Lime-green and true green sit close enough on the wheel that pairing them (e.g., a lime accent on a green background) can be genuinely hard to distinguish for anyone with deuteranomaly (green-weak vision, the most common form of color blindness) — if both a lime and a green element carry meaning on the same screen, add a non-color differentiator such as an icon or pattern. As text, lime is nearly as hard to make AA-compliant on white as pure yellow, for the same underlying luminance reasons. Lime performs somewhat better against a near-black background than it does against white, similar to the yellow-family pattern, though it still needs a genuine contrast check rather than an assumption, since 'high luminance' and 'passes WCAG' are related but not automatically the same thing.
Named examples
GreenYellow and LawnGreen are the two named limes in the CSS set; lawn green is a deliberately saturated reference to fresh-cut grass rather than a botanical pigment name, chosen for its vivid, almost artificial-looking intensity. Chartreuse, formally classified in the green-shades hub on this site because of its exact hue angle, sits close enough to this family's edge that it's frequently described informally as 'lime' rather than by its own more specific liqueur-derived name.
Building a lime design-token scale
Lime rarely appears as a full numbered scale in mainstream design systems — it shows up more often as a single high-visibility accent token (a 'live/recording' indicator, a gamified progress state, a single loud highlight color in an otherwise neutral dashboard) than as body-copy or large-surface color, since sustained exposure to a hue this saturated and this luminant tends to read as fatiguing rather than energizing past a small accent's worth. If you do need a lime scale for data visualization, pairing it with genuinely darker, less saturated greens for the rest of the category set (rather than several lime-adjacent shades) will keep the categories visually distinct from each other. Because lime is visually loud even in small doses, it's worth deliberately limiting how many separate UI elements use it at once — a page with several unrelated lime accents competing for attention tends to feel chaotic rather than energetic, undermining the exact effect the color is usually chosen for.