Basil Smash

#b7e1a1

A green that is muted. It is very light — it works as a page background, not as text.

Hex

#b7e1a1

RGB

183, 225, 161

OKLCh

86.4% 0.096 135.1°

CIELAB (D50)

85.3, -22.8, 26.7

What is true of this colour, and of no other

  • 4 other named colours sit within ΔE00 2 of it.
  • It uses only 38% 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 22.2; on black, Lc -81.1. 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.
  • protanopia and deuteranopia and tritanopia shift it by ΔE00 10.7 and 10.7 and 38.3 — no red cone.

Text on this colour

White text

1.47:1 — fails AA

Black text

14.30:1 — passes AA

Black text is the better of the two at14.30:1. That is enough for body text.

As text on white, it needs to change

#5b8146 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

#b7e1a1

protanopia

#dddda1 · ΔE00 10.7

deuteranopia

#d6d6a2 · ΔE00 10.7

tritanopia

#ceceff · ΔE00 38.3

Run a whole palette through all three

The twelve nearest named colours

Ranked by CIEDE2000 — perceptual distance, not hex arithmetic. The closest isMadang at ΔE00 1.424: between 1 and 2 — a trained eye spots it when the two touch; nobody spots it across a room. What the numbers mean.

  • MadangΔE00 1.424 · #b7e3a8
  • Pastel PeaΔE00 1.489 · #bee7a5
  • Green GooseberryΔE00 1.889 · #b0dfa4
  • Witty GreenΔE00 1.917 · #b1d99d
  • Cactus SpikeΔE00 2.311 · #c1e0a3
  • Embroidered SilkΔE00 2.491 · #b8dca7
  • Basilisk LizardΔE00 2.561 · #bcecac
  • Field DayΔE00 2.644 · #c5e6a4
  • Cool AloeΔE00 2.648 · #a9d99c
  • Ice IceΔE00 2.717 · #baebae
  • AppetiteΔE00 2.721 · #b1e5aa
  • Almost AloeΔE00 2.918 · #bfe5b1

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