All yellow with a blue ring round the eye; the blue is what separates it from the yellow angelfish.
A dwarf angelfish to about 14 cm, entirely bright yellow with a blue ring around the eye, blue margins on the gill cover and preopercular spine, and thin blue edging along the rear of the dorsal and anal fins. The yellow angelfish Centropyge heraldi is the fish it is most often confused with and carries no blue at all, so the eye ring settles it in almost every case. Juveniles have a dark blue-ringed blotch on the flank that fades with growth. Where it meets the pearlscale angelfish Centropyge vrolikii the two hybridise and produce fish that are yellow in front and pale grey behind, which are not reliably assignable in the water.
It grazes algae over coral and rubble, usually in a group of one male and several females holding a patch of shallow reef, and it drops into a hole at the first close approach in the manner of the whole genus. The taxonomy of the lemonpeel complex has been revised more than once and the western limit of the species is not settled, so a Coral Triangle record is best treated as the lemonpeel form rather than as a firm identification to a described range.
It is commonest in the east of the region and patchy westward, and it is scarce on the silty slopes of the muck destinations, where the shallow coral it grazes is limited to isolated heads. Photographing it usually means settling next to an occupied coral head and waiting for the fish to resume its circuit rather than following it. Recorded from about 3 to 25 m.
Ratings are per location: 1 means found on most dives that look for it, 5 means a handful of records. Where enough dives have been logged the figure is calculated from them; otherwise it is an editorial estimate, and says so. We publish habitat and destination, not the dive site.