Cyan Screen – Full-Screen Cyan, Aqua and Turquoise

How it works

A cyan screen fills your display with cyan, #00FFFF: green and blue light at full strength and no red. CSS names the same color aqua. Light cyan, aquamarine and four turquoises are one press away.

Read the full guide

Check a screen on cyan

1. Go full screen on pure cyan. 2. Look across the field for a dot that is not cyan. 3. A white dot is a red sub-pixel stuck on: cyan leaves red dark, and the stuck one completes white.

Questions and answers

What is the hex code for a cyan screen?

#00FFFF: green and blue at 255 and red at 0. The six other shades here run from light cyan, #E0FFFF, to dark turquoise, #00CED1.

Is an aqua screen the same as a cyan screen?

Yes. CSS gives the two names, aqua and cyan, to one code, #00FFFF, so both words mean the field this page opens on.

How does a screen make cyan?

It lights the green and blue sub-pixels fully and leaves red dark. Cyan is the complement of red: white with the red taken out. Add red light at the right strength and the mix is white again.

Why is a cyan screen so bright?

Green carries about 72 percent of a white screen's light and blue about 7, and cyan lights both: about 79 percent in all. Of the colors made by two sub-pixels at full strength, only yellow is brighter, at about 93 percent.

All 13 shades and notes

Cyans, from light cyan to dark turquoise 7

Pure cyan #00FFFF, the shade this page opens on: green and blue at 255 and red at 0. It sends about 79 percent of the light of full white, more than any other shade here but light cyan and aquamarine.
Light cyan #E0FFFF: green and blue stay at 255 and red rises to 224. A white with a faint cool cast, at about 95 percent of white's light, the brightest field on the page.
Pale turquoise #AFEEEE: red at 175 with green and blue level at 238. A soft, milky cyan at about 76 percent of white's light, close to pure cyan for light and far gentler in color.
Aquamarine #7FFFD4: green at 255, blue at 212 and red at 127. It leans to green and gives about 81 percent of white's light, a little more than pure cyan, because the red it adds outweighs the blue it gives up.
Turquoise #40E0D0: green at 224, blue at 208 and red at 64. A cyan that leans slightly to green, at about 59 percent of white's light. The name is the stone's.
Medium turquoise #48D1CC: green at 209 and blue at 204, almost level, with red at 72. A calmer turquoise at about 51 percent of white's light, close to half the light of a white screen.
Dark turquoise #00CED1: red at 0, green at 206 and blue at 209. Close to pure cyan at a lower level, with no red in it at all, at about 49 percent of white's light. The deepest shade on the page.

Show all 13 shades and notes (6 more)

Checking the screen on cyan 3

Stuck green and blue hide on cyan Pure cyan already lights every green and blue sub-pixel fully, so one that is stuck on looks like its neighbors. Look for those on the red screen, where a stuck green shows as a yellow dot and a stuck blue as a magenta one.
A blue dot on cyan The green sub-pixel of that pixel stays dark and blue is left alone. Green supplies about 72 of cyan's 79 points of light, so the dot is dim and stands out at once on the bright field.
A green dot on cyan is easy to miss Here the blue sub-pixel stays dark and green is left alone. Blue supplies only about 7 of cyan's 79 points of light, so the dot is nearly as bright as its neighbors. On the blue screen the same pixel is a black dot.

Turquoise, aquamarine and ink 3

Printer's cyan is another color The cyan ink of four-color printing shares the name and little else. It is usually more saturated than a screen's cyan and lies outside the range a screen can show, so a full-screen cyan is no guide to how the ink prints.
Turquoise leans to green Pure cyan has green and blue level. Three turquoises tip the balance: CSS turquoise has green 16 levels above blue, and medium turquoise 5. Dark turquoise goes the other way by 3, the only shade here with more blue than green.
Aquamarine outshines pure cyan Aquamarine gives about 81 percent of white's light against pure cyan's 79, though its blue is lower. Its red sits at 127, and red counts for about three times as much light as blue.

How this list was compiled: Shades and notes chosen and written for this page. Every hex value is a CSS named color, taken from the table of named colors at https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/CSS/Reference/Values/named-color, read 2026-10-06; the same page lists aqua and cyan as two names for one color. The share of light printed for each shade is its relative luminance (0.2126 R + 0.7152 G + 0.0722 B on linear values, pure white as 100), worked out from the formulas at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SRGB, read 2026-10-06. That a pixel is made of three sub-pixels, that a dark dot is one that stays off and a stuck sub-pixel one that stays lit, is from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Defective_pixel, and that green and blue light make cyan and all three make white is from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RGB_color_model, both read 2026-10-06. That cyan is the complement of red, that turquoise is a cyan toward green named after the stone, and that the cyan ink of four-color printing is usually more saturated than a screen's cyan and outside the range a screen can show, is from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cyan, read 2026-10-06. Wikipedia text is under CC BY-SA 4.0 and is restated here in this site's own words. A color on a screen is not a match for paint, print or another screen, and nothing here is a measurement. Licence: own work