Aster

#867ba9

A violet that is nearly neutral — the hue shows only against a true grey. It is light — black text sits on it comfortably, white text does not.

Hex

#867ba9

RGB

134, 123, 169

OKLCh

61.0% 0.070 295.2°

CIELAB (D50)

53.9, 11.8, -23.1

What is true of this colour, and of no other

  • 3 other named colours sit within ΔE00 2 of it.
  • It uses only 29% 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 66.2; on black, Lc -35.5. 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 10.8 — no blue cone.

Text on this colour

White text

3.87:1 — large text only

Black text

5.42:1 — passes AA

Black text is the better of the two at5.42:1. That is enough for body text.

As text on white, it needs to change

#7b709e 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

#867ba9

protanopia

#7c7ca9 · ΔE00 3.8

deuteranopia

#7e7ea9 · ΔE00 3.7

tritanopia

#81818f · ΔE00 10.8

Run a whole palette through all three

The twelve nearest named colours

Ranked by CIEDE2000 — perceptual distance, not hex arithmetic. The closest isParmentier at ΔE00 0.587: below 1.0 — an ordinary observer cannot tell these apart, even side by side. What the numbers mean.

  • ParmentierΔE00 0.587 · #887cab
  • Grape ParfaitΔE00 1.676 · #8677a9
  • Second PourΔE00 1.949 · #887ca4
  • Purple RhapsodyΔE00 2.33 · #8278ad
  • Aster PurpleΔE00 2.429 · #8881b0
  • Paisley PurpleΔE00 2.554 · #8b79b1
  • MurexΔE00 2.726 · #847eb1
  • Smashed GrapeΔE00 3.169 · #8775a1
  • Old PruneΔE00 3.289 · #8272a4
  • Voxatron PurpleΔE00 3.322 · #83769c
  • TrumpeterΔE00 3.324 · #907baa
  • GentianΔE00 3.458 · #9079ad

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