Golden Mean
#c49b35
A yellow that is muted. It is light — black text sits on it comfortably, white text does not.
Hex
#c49b35
RGB
196, 155, 53
OKLCh
71.0% 0.126 86.1°
CIELAB (D50)
66.5, 8.3, 56.6
What is true of this colour, and of no other
- 7 other named colours sit within ΔE00 2 of it.
- It uses 87% of the chroma sRGB can show at this lightness and hue — close enough to the boundary that a wider display would show it slightly more vividly.
- As text on white it measures APCA Lc 50.6; on black, Lc -51.4. 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 12.2 and 12.3 and 13.4 — no red cone.
Text on this colour
White text
2.60:1 — fails AA
Black text
8.09:1 — passes AA
Black text is the better of the two at8.09:1. That is enough for body text.
As text on white, it needs to change
#967100 is the nearest colour of the same hue that passes AA on white, at 4.50:1. Only the lightness moved, and some saturation was given up to stay inside sRGB.
The same colour, with one cone missing
As you see it
#c49b35
protanopia
#a0a036 · ΔE00 12.2
deuteranopia
#a8a831 · ΔE00 12.3
tritanopia
#b1b100 · ΔE00 13.4
The twelve nearest named colours
Ranked by CIEDE2000 — perceptual distance, not hex arithmetic. The closest isCrispy Gold at ΔE00 1.12: between 1 and 2 — a trained eye spots it when the two touch; nobody spots it across a room. What the numbers mean.
- Crispy GoldΔE00 1.12 · #c49832
- GoldieΔE00 1.532 · #c89d3f
- Local CurryΔE00 1.554 · #cb9e34
- LeisureΔE00 1.644 · #c19634
- Tawny OliveΔE00 1.803 · #c4962c
- Golden FieldΔE00 1.83 · #c39e44
- Satin Sheen GoldΔE00 1.944 · #cba135
- Tiger CatΔE00 2.022 · #cda035
- Golden HistoryΔE00 2.234 · #bb993a
- Nugget GoldΔE00 2.265 · #bf961f
- Herald’s TrumpetΔE00 2.29 · #ce9f2f
- CitronneΔE00 2.303 · #cd9c2b
10 of these have no page of their own: pages exist for the 4,961 colours the dataset marks as good names.