Petrichor

#66cccc

A cyan that is muted. It is light — black text sits on it comfortably, white text does not.

Hex

#66cccc

RGB

102, 204, 204

OKLCh

78.5% 0.095 195.4°

CIELAB (D50)

76.0, -31.0, -9.7

What is true of this colour, and of no other

  • 2 other named colours sit within ΔE00 2 of it.
  • It uses 71% of the chroma sRGB can show at this lightness and hue.
  • As text on white it measures APCA Lc 35.9; on black, Lc -66.6. 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 24.1 and 25.4 and 29.7 — no red cone.

Text on this colour

White text

1.90:1 — fails AA

Black text

11.07:1 — passes AA

Black text is the better of the two at11.07:1. That is enough for body text.

As text on white, it needs to change

#008485 is the nearest colour of the same hue that passes AA on white, at 4.50:1. Only the lightness moved, and some saturation was given up to stay inside sRGB.

Try it against your own background

The same colour, with one cone missing

As you see it

#66cccc

protanopia

#c4c4cc · ΔE00 24.1

deuteranopia

#b6b6ce · ΔE00 25.4

tritanopia

#a4a4ff · ΔE00 29.7

Run a whole palette through all three

The twelve nearest named colours

Ranked by CIEDE2000 — perceptual distance, not hex arithmetic. The closest isTropical Splash at ΔE00 1.695: between 1 and 2 — a trained eye spots it when the two touch; nobody spots it across a room. What the numbers mean.

  • Tropical SplashΔE00 1.695 · #70cbce
  • Setting SailΔE00 1.803 · #5ccbc7
  • RapidsΔE00 2.086 · #52c7c7
  • Blue RadianceΔE00 2.148 · #58cfd4
  • Soft TurquoiseΔE00 2.26 · #74ced2
  • Throat ChakraΔE00 2.288 · #6aced4
  • Chinese LacquerΔE00 2.318 · #60c7c2
  • Port HopeΔE00 2.853 · #54c3c1
  • Gem TurquoiseΔE00 2.935 · #53c2c3
  • Beach SparkleΔE00 3.022 · #71cbd2
  • BelizeΔE00 3.032 · #7fd3d3
  • Nile StoneΔE00 3.071 · #61c9c1

12 of these have no page of their own: pages exist for the 4,961 colours the dataset marks as good names.