Variables: Color alias with alpha / opacity (rgba ideally)

Soooo needed 🙏🙏🙏

Bumping this up… this is the bane of design systems in Figma

+1 This is so needed! Please Figma

We need this

Please, we really need this

Just chiming in to add another voice to the mix; rebuilding our design system and need several variants of our color aliases to use transparency. The lack of this feature has caused us to have to rethink our approach and significantly impacted our process since it is so critical to our new system. 

UP topic

We've been requesting this feature for over two years with genuine hope. Every single day, I check Figma's updates longing to see it finally implemented, and every single day ends in disappointment. It's disheartening to see such a fundamental need remain unaddressed while Figma prioritizes flashy new tools like Sites and Draw Mode. 
As someone who deeply values your product, I urge you to listen to persistent user voices — not just chasing AI trends but solving the real pain points we live with daily.

This feature would be so helpful!  🙏

Please, for the love of God, decouple opacity and color variables.

still waiting… wishing… ffs.

Just had a dev get mad at me for having too many opacity variables. Sweet.

Are we all still waiting for this after 2 years?

This is a very basic feature, but it looks like Figma is busy working on launching an AI feature that nobody requested.

bump

+1 this is really needed

This is absolutely necessary. The current Figma Variables system needs to be developed much further right now it only covers very basic needs. When building a comprehensive design system, you run into many limitations and are forced to rely on hacky workarounds.

Adding my voice to the mix too, this is an essential requirement to manage a color system properly. Variables could be so much more in Figma, it’s disappointing to see so little progress after such a long time.

Same here, waiting for this abilitie, it’s so common to handle opacity into  a design system colors…. just check how the web is evolving with hsl okclh and so on. Every single doc in frontend is build upon this ( tailwind, shadcn, radix, ...)

What’s the point of variables, tokenisation etc if we can’t rely properly this basic thing ?

This and not being able to have a colour gradient variable are very restricting us in the usage of variables right now. 

BUMP!!!

Sorely needed. It has been available in PenPot for ages. Figma is falling behind. BUMP!!!

I hit the exact same limitation and it drove me nuts.

Figma doesn’t let you override the alpha/opacity of an aliased color variable without detaching, so you lose the reference. I built Variables Plus to solve this class of problems by adding formulas on top of Figma Variables.

With Variables Plus you can keep Blue-950 as the single source of truth, then create derived variables like “Blue-950 @ 50%” (or drive the alpha from a separate opacity variable) while staying fully linked — when Blue-950 changes, all opacity variants update automatically.

Example: I reference Blue-950 and apply a 50% opacity formula. If Blue-950 changes later, the derived color updates too, while always keeping 50% opacity.
 

Plugin: https://www.figma.com/community/plugin/1607106236822235286/variables-plus

Demo file (duplicate-ready): https://www.figma.com/community/file/1607096708474658929/variables-plus-demo



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