Metropolitan Silhouette
#3e4244
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
#3e4244
RGB
62, 66, 68
OKLCh
37.6% 0.006 229.0°
CIELAB (D50)
27.6, -1.4, -1.8
What is true of this colour, and of no other
- 12 other named colours sit within ΔE00 2 of it — this part of the space is crowded, and the names here are finer distinctions than most people make.
- 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 93.6; on black, Lc -8.9. 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 7.6 — no blue cone.
Text on this colour
White text
10.16:1 — passes AA
Black text
2.07:1 — fails AA
White text is the better of the two at10.16:1. That is enough for body text.
The same colour, with one cone missing
As you see it
#3e4244
protanopia
#424244 · ΔE00 2.6
deuteranopia
#414144 · ΔE00 2.8
tritanopia
#40404e · ΔE00 7.6
The twelve nearest named colours
Ranked by CIEDE2000 — perceptual distance, not hex arithmetic. The closest isCannon Barrel at ΔE00 1.036: between 1 and 2 — a trained eye spots it when the two touch; nobody spots it across a room. What the numbers mean.
- Cannon BarrelΔE00 1.036 · #3c4142
- Dark ElfΔE00 1.155 · #3b3f42
- TamahaganeΔE00 1.191 · #3b3f40
- Obsidian StoneΔE00 1.21 · #3c3f40
- Seaplane GreyΔE00 1.215 · #3a3f41
- Deep SpaceΔE00 1.224 · #3f4143
- Dark RiverΔE00 1.493 · #3e4445
- StargazingΔE00 1.597 · #414549
- CharadeΔE00 1.861 · #394043
- Chimney SmokeΔE00 1.88 · #3c4247
- Totally BlackΔE00 1.885 · #3f4041
- Black HeronΔE00 1.923 · #444647
10 of these have no page of their own: pages exist for the 4,961 colours the dataset marks as good names.