The Big Freeze

#bbffff

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

#bbffff

RGB

187, 255, 255

OKLCh

95.5% 0.067 196.1°

CIELAB (D50)

95.5, -21.8, -7.2

What is true of this colour, and of no other

  • 4 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 0.0; on black, Lc -99.8. 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 20.2 and 21.8 and 23.4 — no red cone.

Text on this colour

White text

1.11:1 — fails AA

Black text

18.86:1 — passes AA

Black text is the better of the two at18.86:1. That is enough for body text.

As text on white, it needs to change

#3f8181 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

#bbffff

protanopia

#f9f9ff · ΔE00 20.2

deuteranopia

#eeeeff · ΔE00 21.8

tritanopia

#e1e1ff · ΔE00 23.4

Run a whole palette through all three

The twelve nearest named colours

Ranked by CIEDE2000 — perceptual distance, not hex arithmetic. The closest isCeleste at ΔE00 1.41: between 1 and 2 — a trained eye spots it when the two touch; nobody spots it across a room. What the numbers mean.

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