Still Waters Run Deep
#4a5d5f
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
#4a5d5f
RGB
74, 93, 95
OKLCh
46.3% 0.023 204.3°
CIELAB (D50)
38.0, -7.1, -3.7
What is true of this colour, and of no other
- 4 other named colours sit within ΔE00 2 of it.
- It uses only 30% 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 84.0; on black, Lc -17.9. 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.
- protanopia and deuteranopia and tritanopia shift it by ΔE00 9.5 and 10.3 and 19.6 — no red cone.
Text on this colour
White text
6.95:1 — passes AA
Black text
3.02:1 — large text only
White text is the better of the two at6.95:1. That is enough for body text.
The same colour, with one cone missing
As you see it
#4a5d5f
protanopia
#5b5b5f · ΔE00 9.5
deuteranopia
#58585f · ΔE00 10.3
tritanopia
#545486 · ΔE00 19.6
The twelve nearest named colours
Ranked by CIEDE2000 — perceptual distance, not hex arithmetic. The closest isWoodland Night at ΔE00 1.139: between 1 and 2 — a trained eye spots it when the two touch; nobody spots it across a room. What the numbers mean.
- Woodland NightΔE00 1.139 · #475c5d
- Iron ForgeΔE00 1.487 · #475a5e
- VoluteΔE00 1.788 · #445a5e
- Sabionando GreyΔE00 1.87 · #455859
- Blue TapestryΔE00 2.09 · #475c62
- WellingtonΔE00 2.182 · #4f6364
- Long WaterΔE00 2.254 · #425a5e
- Corundum BlueΔE00 2.522 · #4a6267
- Calcite Grey GreenΔE00 2.708 · #52605f
- Silken PineΔE00 2.791 · #495d5a
- Marine MagicΔE00 3.063 · #515e62
- Midnight in NYΔE00 3.087 · #4e5a59
11 of these have no page of their own: pages exist for the 4,961 colours the dataset marks as good names.