D3 supports CIELAB (Lab) and CIELCH (HCL) color spaces, which are designed for humans rather than computers.
Lab and HCL color spaces are special in that the perceived difference between two colors is proportional to their Euclidean distance in color space. This special property, called perceptual uniformity, makes them ideal for accurate visual encoding of data. In contrast, the more familiar RGB and HSL color spaces distort data when used for visualization.
You can create Lab or HCL colors in D3 directly using d3.lab or d3.hcl. For example:
var steelblue = d3.lab(52, -4, -32);
var steelblue = d3.hcl(-97, 32, 52);