Sleepless Blue

#badbed

A blue 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

#badbed

RGB

186, 219, 237

OKLCh

87.3% 0.043 231.8°

CIELAB (D50)

85.4, -8.4, -12.7

What is true of this colour, and of no other

13 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 56% of the chroma sRGB can show at this lightness and hue.
As text on white it measures APCA Lc 21.6; on black, Lc -81.7. 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 13.4 and 14.1 and 15.1 — no red cone.

Text on this colour

White text

1.45:1 — fails AA

Black text

14.44:1 — passes AA

Black text is the better of the two at14.44:1. That is enough for body text.

As text on white, it needs to change

#5d7b8b 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

#badbed

protanopia

#d8d8ed · ΔE00 13.4

deuteranopia

#d2d2ee · ΔE00 14.1

tritanopia

#ccccff · ΔE00 15.1

Run a whole palette through all three

The twelve nearest named colours

Ranked by CIEDE2000 — perceptual distance, not hex arithmetic. The closest isIce Rink at ΔE00 0.687: below 1.0 — an ordinary observer cannot tell these apart, even side by side. What the numbers mean.

Ice RinkΔE00 0.687 · #bbddee
Greek IslesΔE00 0.786 · #bbdcf0
Diamond Soft BlueΔE00 0.877 · #bcdaec
Tropical PoolΔE00 0.954 · #bfdeef
Sky WandererΔE00 1.042 · #b8dced
Twin BlueΔE00 1.188 · #bedbed
Fountains of BudapestΔE00 1.209 · #b9def0
Diluted BlueΔE00 1.346 · #b8def2
Seashore DreamsΔE00 1.505 · #b5dcef
Watercolour SkyΔE00 1.531 · #b9d9e7
Lingerie BlueΔE00 1.802 · #b4d6e5
Paris BlueΔE00 1.811 · #b7dded

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