Light Blue
#add8e6
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
#add8e6
RGB
173, 216, 230
OKLCh
85.6% 0.049 219.7°
CIELAB (D50)
83.6, -12.2, -11.8
What is true of this colour, and of no other
- 22 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 47% of the chroma sRGB can show at this lightness and hue.
- As text on white it measures APCA Lc 24.5; on black, Lc -78.7. 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.
- protanopia and deuteranopia and tritanopia shift it by ΔE00 16.2 and 17.1 and 18.0 — no red cone.
Text on this colour
White text
1.53:1 — fails AA
Black text
13.74:1 — passes AA
Black text is the better of the two at13.74:1. That is enough for body text.
As text on white, it needs to change
#547d8a 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
#add8e6
protanopia
#d4d4e6 · ΔE00 16.2
deuteranopia
#cdcde7 · ΔE00 17.1
tritanopia
#c4c4ff · ΔE00 18.0
The twelve nearest named colours
Ranked by CIEDE2000 — perceptual distance, not hex arithmetic. The closest isBlue Refrain at ΔE00 0.966: below 1.0 — an ordinary observer cannot tell these apart, even side by side. What the numbers mean.
- Blue RefrainΔE00 0.966 · #b0d8e7
- LongitudeΔE00 1.11 · #add5e4
- Lady-In-WaitingΔE00 1.167 · #aedcec
- Light Blue GlintΔE00 1.203 · #a8d3e1
- Minified BlueΔE00 1.284 · #b3dbea
- New PrinceΔE00 1.311 · #b1d9e9
- Blue ClickΔE00 1.318 · #a7d8e8
- Whimsy BlueΔE00 1.415 · #b0dced
- Glacier PointΔE00 1.45 · #b3d8e5
- Rain or ShineΔE00 1.505 · #b5dcea
- Bright and BreezyΔE00 1.508 · #b5ddeb
- Polar WindΔE00 1.639 · #b4dfed
10 of these have no page of their own: pages exist for the 4,961 colours the dataset marks as good names.