Difference Between Aqua and Turquoise

Aqua vs Turquoise

When talking about colors, people often get confused as to how some of them look like, most especially if the colors are more at the tertiary level or greater. Unlike the primary colors red green and blue, some colors just seem to be too technical in terms of the names they possess. Not only that; they also happen to closely resemble other colors, hence people mistake one type of color from the other. Examples of the colors that often get jumbled up are aqua, aquamarine and turquoise. Dwelling in the green to blue color ranges (formally known as the cyan spectrum), these three colors have an appearance that are very near each other.

In the case of Aqua, it is similar to how the electric form of cyan looks like. Although oftentimes in the realm of computer graphic design, both electric cyan and aqua are assigned into one alphanumeric ID in the hex (hexadecimal classification system) that can also be used as an HTML code. Again like electric cyan, it also shares the same color values in the RGB color model (0, 255, 255), which means that there is 0 red, 255 green and 255 blue in the color aqua.

Being one of the most common cyan tones, Aqua can be spotted easily in the color wheel because it is somewhat placed midway between the colors blue and green. Traditionally, aqua is only a shorthand term for aquamarine. Still, up to this date, there is no clear distinction yet between the two colors and that both are used interchangeably.

On the contrary, the turquoise color is similar to how the body of water at the Havascu creek looks like. Unlike aqua or aquamarine, this color is much lighter in appearance. With regard to its own color, turquoise also seems to have a green color that slightly overpowers its blue shade. Nevertheless it’s actually the green cyan shade. The color name turquoise is also coined from the color of the gem bearing the same name.

Dissimilar to aqua, the RGB values of turquoise are 64, 224, and 208. This simply tells us that turquoise has a lighter shade of both the colors green and blue when pitted against aqua. Moreover, it is but obvious that it also has a different hex triplet.

In summary, aqua differs from turquoise in the following aspects:

1. Turquoise is much lighter than aqua.

2. Turquoise has a relatively greener shade over its blue shade compared to aqua which has the same shades of blue and green.

3. Undoubtedly, turquoise has a different hex triplet and RGB value than aqua.

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