The colour is already in your file.
Now find out what it means.

Select a fill. Get its evidence, not its vibe.

There is no run button. Select a shape with a solid fill and the panel renders that colour's Passport card: the swatch, the archive record it resolves to, the citation, and an evidence grade. Change your selection and the card follows.

Every card carries a badge before you read anything else, so you know how much weight the record can take. The badge is a fast preview — the full grade letter and its label render on the card itself, never replaced by the badge.

Under the card, an expandable drawer splits the record three ways: What is documented, What is inferred, and What you must not claim. The third one is the part most colour tools do not have. A weak grade is displayed, not filtered out — the plugin will tell you a colour is Interpretive rather than quietly upgrade it.

One hex, several histories. You pick the story.

A hex is not a colour's identity. Plenty of hexes are shared by records that have nothing to do with each other, and an algorithm ranking them cannot know which one you meant. So the plugin shows you that it is a collision, tells you the rule it ranked by, and lets you choose the record that is actually true for your file.

#DA291C is the honest example. Eight archive records share it exactly:

The choice is remembered — and remembered in the file, not on your machine. "In this document, #DA291C means Ferrari" is a fact about that file, so it is stored on the file and travels with it to collaborators. It will not follow you into an unrelated project and assert something false there.

Pairings that were published, not generated.

Colour tools generate harmonies from arithmetic on the hue wheel. This does not do that. The "Historically paired with" section is drawn from real published colour systems, and it appears only where those sources actually have something to say about your colour:

• Hay — quantifies a pairing as a proportional ratio.
• Vanderpoel (1902) — documents a pairing without quantifying it, and names the plate label it came from.
• Wada — records that a colour appears in a numbered published combination, and names its co-published colours.

Those are three different strengths of claim about three different things, so they are fetched independently, evaluated independently, and rendered as visibly different objects, strongest first. A weaker source never fills a gap left by a stronger one. A colour can have all three, one, or none — and none means the section stays silent rather than offering a consolation pairing.

Collisions apply here too. Where a paired partner's hex is itself shared by several records, the card says so and names the ranking rule, instead of presenting one candidate as the answer.

Your hex is never touched.

The archive's hex and your hex are two different facts, and the plugin refuses to conflate them. If you selected #DA291C, your shape's fill is still exactly #DA291C after the card renders — the record's own hex, where it differs, appears as a secondary note on the card and nowhere else. Accessibility contrast is computed against your input hex, not the archive's, because that is the colour that will ship.

The same restraint governs everything else it touches. These are the rules the plugin is built to:

• Never silently alter the colour you selected.
• Never display a claim stronger than the underlying evidence.
• Never invent a source.
• Never visually conflate your input hex with the archive's hex.
• Never silently overwrite, rename, or unbind existing Figma variables or collections.
• Never modify your document because a network or authentication call failed.
• Never show you a raw developer error.

When you do want the colour committed, Create & apply variable makes a Colour Memory variable and binds it to the fill — a deliberate action, with the record's evidence stored alongside it. And if the API cannot be reached, the panel says so plainly and tells you your file has not been changed.

What the plugin actually puts in front of you.

Six records as the plugin presents them. Every claim below is the archive's own: the source, the grade, and where the evidence stops.

Free to start. The archive always is.

Install from Figma Community, open the panel, and paste a Colour Memory API key. Keys are free on the Explorer tier with no credit card — the same key works across the API, the MCP server and this plugin, so if you already have one you are already set up.

If the key is wrong, you get a sentence in plain English and another go, not an error code. The plugin talks to api.colourmemory.com and nowhere else; that restriction is declared in its manifest, which Figma enforces.