We define a new reduced model to represent coloured images. We propose to use two components for a full definition of a colour instead of three. To that end we take advantage of the geometrical structure of the HCL conical colour space and approximate its circular base by a spiral. We thus write chroma as a function of hue. The resulting spiral is therefore defined by one parameter only. This parameter is then combined with luminance in order to represent all the colour information. Our experiments show that our proposed model ensures an accurate representation of coloured digital images. Furthermore, it preserves the perceptual properties of the original HCL representation.