HueComb

Pastel Lilac

#bdb0d0

A violet that is nearly neutral — the hue shows only against a true grey. It is light — black text sits on it comfortably, white text does not.

Hex

#bdb0d0

RGB

189, 176, 208

OKLCh

77.8% 0.047 303.8°

CIELAB (D50)

73.7, 9.4, -14.5

What is true of this colour, and of no other

  • 9 other named colours sit within ΔE00 2 of it.
  • It uses only 34% 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 39.8; on black, Lc -62.6. 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 5.4 and 5.6 and 21.1 — no red cone.

Text on this colour

White text

2.04:1 — fails AA

Black text

10.28:1 — passes AA

Black text is the better of the two at10.28:1. That is enough for body text.

As text on white, it needs to change

#7e728f 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

#bdb0d0

protanopia

#b2b2d0 · ΔE00 5.4

deuteranopia

#b4b4d0 · ΔE00 5.6

tritanopia

#b7b7ab · ΔE00 21.1

Run a whole palette through all three

The twelve nearest named colours

Ranked by CIEDE2000 — perceptual distance, not hex arithmetic. The closest isFrosted Orchid at ΔE00 1.003: 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.