Charcoal
#343837
A neutral that has no useful hue — it reads as a grey. It is dark — it carries white text and needs care with black.
Hex
#343837
RGB
52, 56, 55
OKLCh
33.7% 0.006 179.4°
CIELAB (D50)
23.1, -1.9, 0.0
What is true of this colour, and of no other
- 6 other named colours sit within ΔE00 2 of it.
- It uses only 9% of the chroma available at this lightness and hue — there is a far more vivid version of this colour inside sRGB.
- As text on white it measures APCA Lc 97.3; 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.
- tritanopia shifts it by ΔE00 8.2 — no blue cone.
Text on this colour
White text
11.89:1 — passes AA
Black text
1.77:1 — fails AA
White text is the better of the two at11.89:1. That is enough for body text.
The same colour, with one cone missing
As you see it
#343837
protanopia
#383837 · ΔE00 2.6
deuteranopia
#373737 · ΔE00 2.8
tritanopia
#363642 · ΔE00 8.2
The twelve nearest named colours
Ranked by CIEDE2000 — perceptual distance, not hex arithmetic. The closest isWet Concrete at ΔE00 0.962: below 1.0 — an ordinary observer cannot tell these apart, even side by side. What the numbers mean.
- Wet ConcreteΔE00 0.962 · #353838
- Green BlackΔE00 1.215 · #373a3a
- Pirate BlackΔE00 1.495 · #363838
- Onyx HeartΔE00 1.542 · #353839
- Phantom ShipΔE00 1.572 · #2f3434
- Tàn Hēi SootΔE00 1.732 · #323939
- Dark GreyΔE00 2.094 · #363737
- Japanese SableΔE00 2.114 · #313739
- Old SchoolΔE00 2.242 · #353c3d
- OilΔE00 2.261 · #313330
- MontanaΔE00 2.272 · #393b3c
- Black LiquoriceΔE00 2.419 · #3a3b3b
9 of these have no page of their own: pages exist for the 4,961 colours the dataset marks as good names.