Cover of Night
#494e4f
A neutral that has no useful hue — it reads as a grey. It is mid — the hardest range to put text on, either colour struggles.
Hex
#494e4f
RGB
73, 78, 79
OKLCh
42.0% 0.007 211.0°
CIELAB (D50)
32.7, -1.9, -1.3
What is true of this colour, and of no other
- 10 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 89.1; on black, Lc -13.1. 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 9.1 — no blue cone.
Text on this colour
White text
8.45:1 — passes AA
Black text
2.49:1 — fails AA
White text is the better of the two at8.45:1. That is enough for body text.
The same colour, with one cone missing
As you see it
#494e4f
protanopia
#4d4d4f · ΔE00 3.1
deuteranopia
#4d4d4f · ΔE00 3.3
tritanopia
#4c4c5c · ΔE00 9.1
The twelve nearest named colours
Ranked by CIEDE2000 — perceptual distance, not hex arithmetic. The closest isBlack Lead at ΔE00 0.683: below 1.0 — an ordinary observer cannot tell these apart, even side by side. What the numbers mean.
- Black LeadΔE00 0.683 · #474c4d
- BlindfoldΔE00 0.71 · #4a4f51
- Eshin GreyΔE00 1.268 · #4a4f52
- Black IceΔE00 1.427 · #4d5051
- AstronomicalΔE00 1.613 · #474b4a
- Typewriter InkΔE00 1.653 · #4c5053
- Muskeg GreyΔE00 1.654 · #4d5052
- Satin BlackΔE00 1.655 · #4e5152
- BlackwoodΔE00 1.799 · #494e52
- WitchcraftΔE00 1.908 · #474c50
- Black SableΔE00 2.011 · #434b4d
- TroutΔE00 2.141 · #4c5356
10 of these have no page of their own: pages exist for the 4,961 colours the dataset marks as good names.