Blues White Shoes
#99badd
A blue 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
#99badd
RGB
153, 186, 221
OKLCh
77.7% 0.062 250.1°
CIELAB (D50)
74.0, -5.4, -21.5
What is true of this colour, and of no other
- 15 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 52% of the chroma sRGB can show at this lightness and hue.
- As text on white it measures APCA Lc 39.1; on black, Lc -63.3. 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 12.1 and 11.7 and 8.5 — no red cone.
Text on this colour
White text
2.01:1 — fails AA
Black text
10.42:1 — passes AA
Black text is the better of the two at10.42:1. That is enough for body text.
As text on white, it needs to change
#5b7a9a 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
#99badd
protanopia
#b7b7dd · ΔE00 12.1
deuteranopia
#b1b1de · ΔE00 11.7
tritanopia
#ababff · ΔE00 8.5
The twelve nearest named colours
Ranked by CIEDE2000 — perceptual distance, not hex arithmetic. The closest isRainy Week at ΔE00 0.518: below 1.0 — an ordinary observer cannot tell these apart, even side by side. What the numbers mean.
- Rainy WeekΔE00 0.518 · #99bbdd
- FleckΔE00 0.892 · #97bbe1
- Sacred BlueΔE00 1.016 · #97b9e0
- Blue GrouseΔE00 1.13 · #9abcdc
- Wings of PegasusΔE00 1.322 · #9ebbda
- Gallery BlueΔE00 1.429 · #9bbce4
- Aegean MistΔE00 1.431 · #9cbbe2
- Double DenimΔE00 1.454 · #95bce1
- Baltic BreamΔE00 1.51 · #9fbbda
- Echo Isles WaterΔE00 1.595 · #95b5db
- Vive le BleuΔE00 1.68 · #97bee2
- Sleeping EasyΔE00 1.757 · #98bddd
11 of these have no page of their own: pages exist for the 4,961 colours the dataset marks as good names.