Grey Area
#8f9394
A neutral that has no useful hue — it reads as a grey. It is light — black text sits on it comfortably, white text does not.
Hex
#8f9394
RGB
143, 147, 148
OKLCh
66.0% 0.005 214.3°
CIELAB (D50)
60.6, -1.4, -1.1
What is true of this colour, and of no other
- 12 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 almost none of the chroma available here: this is a grey with a trace of hue rather than a colour.
- As text on white it measures APCA Lc 58.0; on black, Lc -43.7. 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 7.1 — no blue cone.
Text on this colour
White text
3.10:1 — large text only
Black text
6.77:1 — passes AA
Black text is the better of the two at6.77:1. That is enough for body text.
As text on white, it needs to change
#747778 is the nearest colour of the same hue that passes AA on white, at 4.50:1. Only the lightness moved.
The same colour, with one cone missing
As you see it
#8f9394
protanopia
#939394 · ΔE00 2.3
deuteranopia
#929294 · ΔE00 2.4
tritanopia
#91919f · ΔE00 7.1
The twelve nearest named colours
Ranked by CIEDE2000 — perceptual distance, not hex arithmetic. The closest isKiwikiwi Grey at ΔE00 0.333: below 1.0 — an ordinary observer cannot tell these apart, even side by side. What the numbers mean.
- Kiwikiwi GreyΔE00 0.333 · #909495
- Flint ShardΔE00 0.549 · #8f9395
- Moody WhitbyΔE00 0.87 · #8f9294
- Silver SnippetΔE00 1.428 · #8e9090
- African GreyΔE00 1.65 · #939899
- Millennial GreigeΔE00 1.69 · #939796
- Grey RussianΔE00 1.732 · #8e9598
- Gotham GreyΔE00 1.763 · #8a9192
- Neutral GreyΔE00 1.8 · #8e918f
- BarometerΔE00 1.808 · #929899
- Stieglitz SilverΔE00 1.893 · #8d8f8e
- Boulder CreekΔE00 1.958 · #8c9496
12 of these have no page of their own: pages exist for the 4,961 colours the dataset marks as good names.