Beautiful Darkness
#686d70
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
#686d70
RGB
104, 109, 112
OKLCh
53.1% 0.008 233.8°
CIELAB (D50)
45.7, -1.5, -2.4
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 7% 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 76.0; on black, Lc -25.7. 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 8.5 — no blue cone.
Text on this colour
White text
5.24:1 — passes AA
Black text
4.01:1 — large text only
White text is the better of the two at5.24:1. That is enough for body text.
The same colour, with one cone missing
As you see it
#686d70
protanopia
#6c6c70 · ΔE00 3.0
deuteranopia
#6c6c70 · ΔE00 3.2
tritanopia
#6b6b7d · ΔE00 8.5
The twelve nearest named colours
Ranked by CIEDE2000 — perceptual distance, not hex arithmetic. The closest isPlatinum Grey at ΔE00 1.129: between 1 and 2 — a trained eye spots it when the two touch; nobody spots it across a room. What the numbers mean.
- Platinum GreyΔE00 1.129 · #6a6d6f
- Midnight GreyΔE00 1.196 · #666a6d
- Night OutΔE00 1.261 · #656a6e
- Bottlenose DolphinΔE00 1.287 · #6a7074
- Liberty Bell GreyΔE00 1.727 · #696b6d
- Dark AshΔE00 1.862 · #6a6d6d
- High-Speed SteelΔE00 1.908 · #6d7074
- Wall StreetΔE00 1.939 · #656d73
- BatmanΔE00 1.962 · #656e72
- Rich PewterΔE00 1.963 · #6b7172
- Almost CharcoalΔE00 2.041 · #6b7070
- Antique TinΔE00 2.045 · #6e7173
11 of these have no page of their own: pages exist for the 4,961 colours the dataset marks as good names.