Citadel

#6a7f8b

A blue that is nearly neutral — the hue shows only against a true grey. It is mid — the hardest range to put text on, either colour struggles.

Hex

#6a7f8b

RGB

106, 127, 139

OKLCh

58.4% 0.031 233.1°

CIELAB (D50)

51.8, -5.8, -9.2

What is true of this colour, and of no other

  • 7 other named colours sit within ΔE00 2 of it.
  • It uses only 25% 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 68.8; on black, Lc -32.8. 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 10.1 and 10.8 and 14.0 — no red cone.

Text on this colour

White text

4.18:1 — large text only

Black text

5.02:1 — passes AA

Black text is the better of the two at5.02:1. That is enough for body text.

As text on white, it needs to change

#657a86 is the nearest colour of the same hue that passes AA on white, at 4.50:1. Only the lightness moved.

Try it against your own background

The same colour, with one cone missing

As you see it

#6a7f8b

protanopia

#7d7d8b · ΔE00 10.1

deuteranopia

#79798b · ΔE00 10.8

tritanopia

#7575b5 · ΔE00 14.0

Run a whole palette through all three

The twelve nearest named colours

Ranked by CIEDE2000 — perceptual distance, not hex arithmetic. The closest isLynch at ΔE00 0.795: below 1.0 — an ordinary observer cannot tell these apart, even side by side. What the numbers mean.

  • LynchΔE00 0.795 · #697d89
  • Risk-RewardΔE00 0.935 · #6a7e88
  • Cascade TourΔE00 1.253 · #697f8e
  • Blue PrinceΔE00 1.307 · #6a808f
  • Windy SeasΔE00 1.418 · #667f8b
  • Astronomicon GreyΔE00 1.888 · #6b7c85
  • Mica CreekΔE00 1.954 · #70828f
  • PassagewayΔE00 2.005 · #647b86
  • Stormy OceansΔE00 2.051 · #70818e
  • Slate ExpectationsΔE00 2.068 · #6e7f8d
  • Oyster BayΔE00 2.111 · #71818c
  • Polished SteelΔE00 2.14 · #6f828a

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