The color, broken down
Four ways to describe one color. Each slider in the game maps to one of these dimensions.
- HEX
#D71D3F
- RGB
- 215, 29, 63
- HSB
- 349°, 87%, 84%
- HSL
- 349°, 76%, 48%
Nearby tones that look right and are wrong
#D61C25
#D61C57
#D63653
#D60229
#B31734
How this color came to be
Eric Cartman is one of the four main characters in South Park (1997). His red jacket is part of the show's deliberately simple, cutout-construction-paper visual style. The color was chosen by creators Trey Parker and Matt Stone as part of a four-color quartet — Stan's blue hat, Kyle's green ushanka, Kenny's orange parka, Cartman's red jacket — designed for instant character recognition in an otherwise minimalist visual world.
The hex breaks down to HSB(349°, 87%, 84%). That's a red sitting just shy of pure red on the hue wheel (a tiny lean toward magenta), with high saturation and high brightness. It's a confident red, but not the maxed-out fire-engine red that some cartoons use. The slight magenta lean gives it warmth that distinguishes it from Mickey Mouse's brick red — Cartman's color is more vibrant, less earthy. Both are reds, but they live one full step apart on the saturation–brightness plane.
Players who guess Cartman's red consistently overshoot brightness or undershoot saturation. The trap is reaching for a "crimson" or "burgundy" that sits darker than Cartman's actual color. The South Park red is bright, not dark. Match by hitting saturation at ~87% and brightness at ~84%, and don't darken past those targets.
How to match it from memory
Calibrated to this character's specific hex, not generic color advice.
- Saturation: ~87% — committed and high.
- Brightness: ~84% — bright but not blown out.
- Hue: 349° — a hair on the magenta side of pure red.
- Common mistake: too dark (Mickey-like burgundy) or too bright (fire-engine).
