xmobar is using low color depth resulting in bad contrast

Question

I'm trying to set-up xmobar with xmonad.

I've run into an issue with the color depth used by xmobar where the color displayed is same for "#5e81ac" (blue) and "#1c1f26" (dark gray). The 'dark gray' color is the background in my config and I'm trying to use the 'blue' color to display some info in an accent color.

I tried using "#bf616a" (red) as the accent color and that works just fine

-- In .xmonad/xmonad.hs
...
nordBlue1 = "5e81ac"
nordRed = "#bf616a"
...
-- , ppCurrent = xmobarColor nordBlue1 "" . wrap "[" "]"  -- can't see this
   , ppCurrent = xmobarColor nordRed   "" . wrap "[" "]"  -- can see this

-- In .config/xmobar/xmobarrc
Config = {
    ...
    bgColor = "#1c1f26"
    ...
}

I think this is because xmobar is using a low color depth (maybe 16 color).

Is there a way to make xmobar use true-color?

---

Well. I'm an idiot. As noted by @pmf in the comments, I was missing the '#' in the color value.