Gentle Sky
#99bdd2
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
#99bdd2
RGB
153, 189, 210
OKLCh
77.9% 0.049 233.8°
CIELAB (D50)
74.5, -8.9, -14.8
What is true of this colour, and of no other
- 8 other named colours sit within ΔE00 2 of it.
- It uses only 37% 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 38.4; on black, Lc -64.0. 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 14.4 and 14.9 and 12.6 — no red cone.
Text on this colour
White text
1.99:1 — fails AA
Black text
10.56:1 — passes AA
Black text is the better of the two at10.56:1. That is enough for body text.
As text on white, it needs to change
#597b8f 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
#99bdd2
protanopia
#b9b9d2 · ΔE00 14.4
deuteranopia
#b3b3d3 · ΔE00 14.9
tritanopia
#acacff · ΔE00 12.6
The twelve nearest named colours
Ranked by CIEDE2000 — perceptual distance, not hex arithmetic. The closest isSky Bus at ΔE00 1.348: between 1 and 2 — a trained eye spots it when the two touch; nobody spots it across a room. What the numbers mean.
- Sky BusΔE00 1.348 · #99c1d6
- Angel SolΔE00 1.415 · #9bc2d7
- Partly CloudyΔE00 1.62 · #9dbbcd
- Northern Sky BlueΔE00 1.623 · #9cbacd
- Arctic SunriseΔE00 1.697 · #9bbacb
- Stretch of WaterΔE00 1.701 · #9dbbd0
- Madras BlueΔE00 1.8 · #9ac3da
- Anchors AwayΔE00 1.849 · #9ebbcd
- MångataΔE00 2.102 · #9dbcd4
- January FrostΔE00 2.133 · #99c1dc
- Moon JellyfishΔE00 2.152 · #8eb8ce
- Charismatic SkyΔE00 2.159 · #9ac1dc
12 of these have no page of their own: pages exist for the 4,961 colours the dataset marks as good names.