Shade

A shade is the mirror of a tint: where a tint mixes white into a hue, a shade mixes black into it. In an interface the shades of the accent are what the hover and pressed states of a solid button are made of, what a border on a coloured fill is made of, and what a dark theme reaches for when a pale tint would glare. Numbered palettes bury the word inside the numbering: everything above the base step in a Tailwind or Radix scale is, in effect, a shade of it.

The mechanical trap is that black is not a neutral ingredient. Mixing toward pure black drains chroma as well as lightness, so a naive shade ramp ends in a sequence of near greys that no longer look like the hue they came from. Palettes that hold up keep some chroma as they descend, or bend the hue slightly warm or cool on the way down, which is why hand tuned ramps still beat a straight mix for the darkest two or three steps.

Shades also carry most of the contrast burden. Text on a light background is a deep shade rather than the base hue, because the base of a saturated ramp almost never clears 4.5 to 1 against white. The pattern most systems settle on is that mid steps are for fills, dark steps are for text and icons on light surfaces, and the darkest steps are for borders and pressed states where the shape matters more than the colour.

One word of caution about vocabulary: in casual use “shade” often just means “a colour”, as in shades of blue, and in some systems it names every step of a ramp including the light ones. The strict sense, black added to a hue, is the one worth keeping, because it is the only one that pairs cleanly with tint and tone.