Most controls derive their colors from -fx-base by applying a particular "subdue" effect, making most controls look "equally subdue". Hence, setting "-fx-base" changes the base color but keeps the effect.

Charts do not, unfortunately. Instead, charts apply a fixed color palette literally provided by modena.css, which is precomputed. The problem is that this makes it impossible to provide custom colors for bars and gain the "subdue" effect (as one cannot set -fx-base for bars).

It would be great if this could be changed in a future JavaFX release, so one could write "-fx-bar-base: red" and effectively gain a "subdue red" bar.