Blue Ocean
#009dc4
A cyan that is muted. It is light — black text sits on it comfortably, white text does not.
Hex
#009dc4
RGB
0, 157, 196
OKLCh
64.6% 0.121 223.7°
CIELAB (D50)
59.5, -24.9, -30.5
What is true of this colour, and of no other
- 8 other named colours sit within ΔE00 2 of it.
- It sits exactly on the sRGB boundary: at this lightness and hue the gamut has nothing left, and a wider display would show a more colourful version of it.
- As text on white it measures APCA Lc 58.2; on black, Lc -43.5. The sign is the polarity, which the WCAG ratio discards.
- Built into an eleven-step scale, 10 of the 10 adjacent pairs stay ΔE00 2 apart — see the ramp.
- protanopia and deuteranopia and tritanopia shift it by ΔE00 24.4 and 24.0 and 24.6 — no red cone.
Text on this colour
White text
3.17:1 — large text only
Black text
6.62:1 — passes AA
Black text is the better of the two at6.62:1. That is enough for body text.
As text on white, it needs to change
#0081a2 is the nearest colour of the same hue that passes AA on white, at 4.50:1. Only the lightness moved, and some saturation was given up to stay inside sRGB.
The same colour, with one cone missing
As you see it
#009dc4
protanopia
#9595c4 · ΔE00 24.4
deuteranopia
#8686c5 · ΔE00 24.0
tritanopia
#7373ff · ΔE00 24.6
The twelve nearest named colours
Ranked by CIEDE2000 — perceptual distance, not hex arithmetic. The closest isSea Wonder at ΔE00 0.769: below 1.0 — an ordinary observer cannot tell these apart, even side by side. What the numbers mean.
- Sea WonderΔE00 0.769 · #0f9bc0
- Major BlueΔE00 1.151 · #289ec4
- Delos BlueΔE00 1.362 · #169ec0
- Blue HorizonΔE00 1.562 · #289dbe
- Butterfly BlueΔE00 1.711 · #2099bb
- Serene BlueΔE00 1.783 · #1199bb
- Resonant BlueΔE00 1.828 · #01a2c6
- CharybdisΔE00 1.975 · #16a3cb
- Scuba BlueΔE00 2.002 · #00a2c5
- Cyan BlueΔE00 2.077 · #14a3c7
- SailfishΔE00 2.095 · #2e9cbb
- Ahriman BlueΔE00 2.205 · #199ebd
12 of these have no page of their own: pages exist for the 4,961 colours the dataset marks as good names.