Blue Whale
#1e3442
A blue that is nearly neutral — the hue shows only against a true grey. It is dark — it carries white text and needs care with black.
Hex
#1e3442
RGB
30, 52, 66
OKLCh
31.3% 0.038 237.6°
CIELAB (D50)
20.4, -5.5, -11.7
What is true of this colour, and of no other
- One other named colour sits within ΔE00 2 of it.
- It uses 55% of the chroma sRGB can show at this lightness and hue.
- As text on white it measures APCA Lc 99.0; on black, Lc 0.0. 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 10.9 and 11.7 and 12.9 — no red cone.
Text on this colour
White text
12.92:1 — passes AA
Black text
1.63:1 — fails AA
White text is the better of the two at12.92:1. That is enough for body text.
The same colour, with one cone missing
As you see it
#1e3442
protanopia
#323242 · ΔE00 10.9
deuteranopia
#2f2f42 · ΔE00 11.7
tritanopia
#2b2b61 · ΔE00 12.9
The twelve nearest named colours
Ranked by CIEDE2000 — perceptual distance, not hex arithmetic. The closest isInto the Night at ΔE00 1.613: between 1 and 2 — a trained eye spots it when the two touch; nobody spots it across a room. What the numbers mean.
- Into the NightΔE00 1.613 · #1e3642
- Petrol SlumberΔE00 2.102 · #243640
- TangaroaΔE00 2.106 · #1e2f3c
- Tahitian PearlΔE00 2.304 · #263644
- Elderberry BlackΔE00 2.557 · #1e323b
- NATO BlueΔE00 2.623 · #153043
- Imperial PrimerΔE00 2.75 · #21303e
- Subterranean RiverΔE00 2.76 · #1f3b4d
- AdeptΔE00 2.806 · #293947
- TaraweraΔE00 2.827 · #253c48
- CraftΔE00 2.908 · #293b4a
- Blue-BlackΔE00 3.08 · #24313d
10 of these have no page of their own: pages exist for the 4,961 colours the dataset marks as good names.