True black theme

Most dark themes are not black. Material’s baseline surface is #121212, and almost every design system picks something similar: dark enough to read as night, light enough to have somewhere to go. A true black theme takes the background to #000000 on purpose, usually as a second dark theme offered beside the first, because on an OLED panel a black pixel is an unlit pixel and the screen genuinely goes dark rather than dimly grey.

The cost is that the palette loses its floor. Elevation in a dark scheme is carried by an elevation overlay, a white film whose opacity rises with height, and it works because every plane is painted from one base colour that the film can lighten. Start at pure black and the first rung still exists but there is nothing beneath it, and a drop shadow has nothing darker to darken at all, so a card floats without ever looking raised. The usual repair is to give surfaces a hairline border, which is why true black interfaces tend to look drawn rather than stacked.

The screen argument is real but smaller than it sounds. Power saved scales with how much of the display is actually black, so a mostly black reading app saves meaningfully and a dashboard full of panels saves very little, and none of it applies to an LCD, where the backlight stays on and pure black just looks dark grey. There are two artefacts worth knowing. Black smearing: OLED pixels are slower coming back up from fully off, so fast scrolling over pure black can trail. And halation, where pure white text on pure black blooms for readers with astigmatism, which is the accessibility argument against making this the only dark theme on offer.

The practical shape is a third option rather than a replacement. Keep the near black theme as the default, offer true black for people who want it, and if you ship one, do not pair it with #FFFFFF text: something around #E8EAEF keeps the contrast ratio far above the threshold while taking the glare off. Give every surface a border so the layers survive without shadows, and check what your status colours do at that depth, since saturated hues that read fine on #121212 can vibrate against nothing at all.