Reading Tea Leaves
#7d5d5e
A red 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
#7d5d5e
RGB
125, 93, 94
OKLCh
51.2% 0.042 16.6°
CIELAB (D50)
42.9, 13.6, 4.8
What is true of this colour, and of no other
- 3 other named colours sit within ΔE00 2 of it.
- It uses only 21% 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 79.1; on black, Lc -22.7. 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.
- protanopia and deuteranopia and tritanopia shift it by ΔE00 15.3 and 17.8 and 31.2 — no red cone.
Text on this colour
White text
5.83:1 — passes AA
Black text
3.60:1 — large text only
White text is the better of the two at5.83:1. That is enough for body text.
The same colour, with one cone missing
As you see it
#7d5d5e
protanopia
#61615e · ΔE00 15.3
deuteranopia
#68685d · ΔE00 17.8
tritanopia
#6e6e00 · ΔE00 31.2
The twelve nearest named colours
Ranked by CIEDE2000 — perceptual distance, not hex arithmetic. The closest isTarsier at ΔE00 1.713: between 1 and 2 — a trained eye spots it when the two touch; nobody spots it across a room. What the numbers mean.
- TarsierΔE00 1.713 · #825e61
- Book BinderΔE00 1.719 · #805d5b
- CzarinaΔE00 1.956 · #775859
- Musk DeerΔE00 2.17 · #7e5b58
- Aged BeechΔE00 2.198 · #846262
- Berry BrandyΔE00 2.387 · #7d5857
- Forbidden ThrillΔE00 2.556 · #856363
- Falcon WingΔE00 2.706 · #76595e
- Pretty PuceΔE00 2.722 · #7b6065
- CelineΔE00 2.784 · #826167
- Blueberry BlushΔE00 3.032 · #836268
- AlaeaΔE00 3.036 · #81585b
12 of these have no page of their own: pages exist for the 4,961 colours the dataset marks as good names.