The International Color Consortium (ICC) has developed a useful tool for communicating color characteristics between different computers and devices. This tool is the ICC profile, a cross-platform data file format designed for flexibility and portability of color transformation data. The ICC Profile Format Specification is the reference for this format. However, the ICC format is complex and there is a lot of room for errors and misunderstanding when creating an ICC profile. Since many companies and institutions are creating Color Matching Modules (CMMs), and even more are creating profiles, it is important that each of these be interoperable. Misunderstandings of the specification could lead to problems with compatibility between CMMs and profiles created by different vendors.To address this issue, the ICC has formed a working group to design some software to verify compliance with the specification. One result of this work is the ICC Profile Validator. This paper describes the motivation, design considerations, and limitations of an ICC profile validator.