HueComb

Explosive Grey

#c4c4c4

A neutral that has no useful hue — it reads as a grey. It is very light — it works as a page background, not as text.

Hex

#c4c4c4

RGB

196, 196, 196

OKLCh

82.0% 0.000 89.9°

CIELAB (D50)

79.2, 0.0, 0.0

What is true of this colour, and of no other

  • 30 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 almost none of the chroma available here: this is a grey with a trace of hue rather than a colour.
  • As text on white it measures APCA Lc 31.8; on black, Lc -70.9. 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.
  • All three dichromacies see it as very nearly the same colour you do: its hue is not the part carrying its identity.

Text on this colour

White text

1.74:1 — fails AA

Black text

12.04:1 — passes AA

Black text is the better of the two at12.04:1. That is enough for body text.

As text on white, it needs to change

#777777 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

#c4c4c4

protanopia

#c4c4c4 · ΔE00 0.0

deuteranopia

#c4c4c4 · ΔE00 0.0

tritanopia

#c4c4c4 · ΔE00 0.0

Run a whole palette through all three

The twelve nearest named colours

Ranked by CIEDE2000 — perceptual distance, not hex arithmetic. The closest isLunar Rock at ΔE00 0.252: below 1.0 — an ordinary observer cannot tell these apart, even side by side. 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.