HueComb

Too Big to Whale

#9596a4

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

#9596a4

RGB

149, 150, 164

OKLCh

67.7% 0.021 282.6°

CIELAB (D50)

62.3, 1.7, -7.5

What is true of this colour, and of no other

  • 9 other named colours sit within ΔE00 2 of it.
  • It uses only 12% 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 55.7; on black, Lc -46.1. 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.
  • All three dichromacies see it as very nearly the same colour you do: its hue is not the part carrying its identity.

Text on this colour

White text

2.93:1 — fails AA

Black text

7.18:1 — passes AA

Black text is the better of the two at7.18:1. That is enough for body text.

As text on white, it needs to change

#757683 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

#9596a4

protanopia

#9696a4 · ΔE00 0.5

deuteranopia

#9696a4 · ΔE00 0.6

tritanopia

#9696a7 · ΔE00 1.5

Run a whole palette through all three

The twelve nearest named colours

Ranked by CIEDE2000 — perceptual distance, not hex arithmetic. The closest isAcanthus at ΔE00 0.963: below 1.0 — an ordinary observer cannot tell these apart, even side by side. What the numbers mean.

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