Purple Reign
Purple is the color that spent most of history being illegal to wear. Sitting between red's heat and blue's calm, it reads as luxurious, creative, and a little mysterious: the choice of royalty, wizards, and brands that want to feel premium without saying so. A purple background brings instant richness to a screen. Below: ready-to-download purple backgrounds, the shades and codes to build your own, and the story behind the color.
Purple color codes
Gallery
A sample of ready-to-use purple backgrounds. Hover any image and hit the download button to grab the full-resolution version.
Ways to use a purple background
- Wallpaper: a deep purple wallpaper feels rich on a desktop and striking on a phone; every image above downloads at full resolution.
- Plain & solid: lavender and plum make unexpected, flattering backdrops for product shots and portraits; grab an exact shade below.
- Web & design: purple is the premium signal: streaming services, beauty brands, and fintechs use it to feel elevated without the coldness of black.
Shades of purple
Purple covers everything from a whisper to a velvet curtain. The light end (lavender, thistle, lilac) is soft and calming. The middle belongs to amethyst, orchid, and violet: purples with real voltage. Go deep and you reach royalty: byzantium, tyrian, and indigo, the purples that used to require a throne.
Click a shade to copy its hex code, or download it as a ready-to-use background:
One shade in the grid has a story: Rebecca Purple (#663399) was added to the CSS specification in memory of Rebecca Meyer, daughter of CSS pioneer Eric Meyer, a small permanent memorial written into the web itself.
Want even more? Explore the full shades of purple collection.
Purple gradient backgrounds
Purple gradients are twilight in CSS form: dusk fading into night. Here are six ready-made purple gradients. Copy the CSS straight into a stylesheet, or download the full-resolution image. Want to build your own? Open CSS Gradient and roll a custom purple.
What purple means
Purple means power, creativity, and a certain refusal to be ordinary.
The color of kings (by law)
For centuries purple wasn't just associated with royalty; it was legally reserved for it. Roman emperors wore Tyrian purple while sumptuary laws kept it off everyone else; Elizabethan England wrote similar rules. The exclusivity was economic before it was symbolic: the dye was so costly that wearing it was wearing a fortune. The association stuck: crowns, robes, and the Purple Heart all trade on it still.
Cultural significance of the color purple
Beyond thrones, purple belongs to the imaginative and the unconventional: it's the color of Mardi Gras and Advent, of Prince and psychedelia, of luxury packaging and fantasy paperbacks. It's also genuinely rare in nature (a handful of flowers, a few gemstones), which may be why it never stopped feeling special.
History of purple
Tyrian purple, the ancient world's most precious color, was extracted from sea snails at a rate of roughly ten thousand snails per gram of dye; the Phoenician cities that produced it smelled notorious and grew rich. That scarcity is the entire origin of purple-as-royalty.
Everything changed in 1856, when an eighteen-year-old chemistry student named William Perkin, failing to synthesize the malaria drug quinine, accidentally created mauveine, the first synthetic dye in history. Mauve went from imperial monopoly to mass fashion within a decade, kicked off the synthetic color industry, and ended purple's four-thousand-year reign as the color money couldn't easily buy.
Colophon
While Cool Backgrounds is a fine resource for generating images from popular javascript libraries, the real heavy lifting comes from the library authors themselves. When it comes to customer support, Quinn Rohlf from Trianglify.js is incredibly responsive and a really smart guy to boot. Particle.js is developed by Marc Brüderlin with a wonderful API and is being actively maintained. Gradient Topography is a newly minted project by me as a response to the amazing work by the Codrops crew. And of course Unsplash is one of the best internet treasures of all time, built by the former Crew team as a side project.
Oh yea and can’t forget CSS Gradient and Rellax.js which is the “cool background” that powers those sliding parallax shapes in the content section of this site!