Pastel palette generator
Nearest named colour: lavender
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Generates pastels; colours held at high lightness and modest saturation, which is what makes a colour read as pastel rather than merely pale.
How to use the pastel palette generator
A pastel is not just a light colour. Take a saturated red and raise its lightness and you get pink; take it and also reduce its saturation and you get the soft, slightly chalky quality people mean by pastel. Both moves are needed. The practical warning with pastels is contrast: they are light by definition, so dark text on them works and white text on them almost never does. If a pastel palette is going near body copy, check it; a pastel background with white text is one of the most common accessibility failures in modern design.
Questions
High lightness *and* reduced saturation. Lightness alone gives you a tint, which reads differently.
Almost never; pastels are too light. Dark text on a pastel is the combination that works.
Not necessarily. A palette generator arranges hues; it says nothing about contrast. Check any text-on-background pair against the contrast checker before shipping it.
Hex for anything going into a design tool, HSL when you want to adjust lightness by hand, and OKLCH when you need two colours to look equally light; it is the only one of the four where that number means what you expect.
Related but not identical. A tint is a colour mixed with white; a pastel also has its saturation pulled down.