Winter Wizard

#a0e6ff

A cyan that is nearly neutral — the hue shows only against a true grey. It is very light — it works as a page background, not as text.

Hex

#a0e6ff

RGB

160, 230, 255

OKLCh

88.7% 0.078 222.3°

CIELAB (D50)

87.3, -18.1, -19.5

What is true of this colour, and of no other

  • 2 other named colours sit within ΔE00 2 of it.
  • It sits exactly on the sRGB boundary: at this lightness and hue the gamut has nothing left, and a wider display would show a more colourful version of it.
  • As text on white it measures APCA Lc 18.3; on black, Lc -85.3. 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 20.9 and 20.5 and 20.2 — no red cone.

Text on this colour

White text

1.38:1 — fails AA

Black text

15.26:1 — passes AA

Black text is the better of the two at15.26:1. That is enough for body text.

As text on white, it needs to change

#3a7f96 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

#a0e6ff

protanopia

#e0e0ff · ΔE00 20.9

deuteranopia

#d5d5ff · ΔE00 20.5

tritanopia

#c8c8ff · ΔE00 20.2

Run a whole palette through all three

The twelve nearest named colours

Ranked by CIEDE2000 — perceptual distance, not hex arithmetic. The closest isFresh Air at ΔE00 0.836: below 1.0 — an ordinary observer cannot tell these apart, even side by side. What the numbers mean.

  • Fresh AirΔE00 0.836 · #a6e7ff
  • Ganon BlueΔE00 0.932 · #a4e4fc
  • Beyond the CloudsΔE00 3.061 · #aaeeff
  • Frozen LandscapeΔE00 3.073 · #aee4ff
  • Non-Photo BlueΔE00 3.446 · #a4dded
  • Columbia BlueΔE00 3.524 · #9bddff
  • Sora BlueΔE00 3.545 · #a0d8ef
  • Tranquil PoolΔE00 3.597 · #88ddff
  • Van Gogh BlueΔE00 3.603 · #abddf1
  • Atmospheric Soft BlueΔE00 3.641 · #ace1f0
  • Mizu CyanΔE00 3.706 · #a7dbed
  • Gas GiantΔE00 3.776 · #98dcff

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