Muted (desaturated) palette
Colors with the chroma dialed down so they sit closer to gray: dusty, dry, quietly expensive instead of loud and candy-bright.
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What it is
A muted palette keeps the hues but pulls the chroma down, so every color sits closer to gray. In paint terms these are tones: hue plus gray, as opposed to tints (plus white) or shades (plus black). Dusty rose, sage, clay, slate blue, mustard. The colors still read as colors, they just stop shouting.
Reach for it when the content is the point and the color is the frame: photography portfolios, editorial layouts, wellness and fashion brands, long-form reading. It also solves a specific problem, which is that a palette of full-chroma colors has no room left for emphasis. Cut the field to roughly a third of its original chroma and one full-chroma accent will do enormous work. Anchors: Kinfolk and Cereal magazine, Wes Anderson interiors, most of the 'quiet luxury' wave.
Gotcha: muted is a chroma move, not a lightness move, and people collapse the two. If you desaturate everything and also flatten the lightness range, you get mud: nothing separates, hierarchy dies, and text fails contrast. Keep the value contrast wide (squint and it should still read) while the chroma stays low. Muted colors also shift more than saturated ones under different displays and in dark mode, so check a dusty pink on an OLED phone before shipping it.
Ask AI for it
Convert this palette to a muted, desaturated scheme: convert every color to OKLCH, keep its hue and lightness, and multiply its chroma by 0.35 so the colors read as dusty tones (dusty rose, sage green, clay, slate blue, mustard), then gamut-map the result. Preserve a wide lightness range between background, surface, and text so hierarchy and contrast survive the desaturation. Leave exactly one designated accent at its original chroma and use it only for the primary action. Output oklch() plus hex for every swatch. No pure black, no pure white, no neon.