HueComb

Steel Mist

#c6ceda

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

#c6ceda

RGB

198, 206, 218

OKLCh

84.9% 0.019 258.4°

CIELAB (D50)

82.4, -1.1, -7.0

What is true of this colour, and of no other

  • 26 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 only 25% 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 26.6; on black, Lc -76.4. 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.
  • tritanopia shifts it by ΔE00 9.7 — no blue cone.

Text on this colour

White text

1.59:1 — fails AA

Black text

13.24:1 — passes AA

Black text is the better of the two at13.24:1. That is enough for body text.

As text on white, it needs to change

#707782 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

#c6ceda

protanopia

#cdcdda · ΔE00 4.1

deuteranopia

#ccccda · ΔE00 4.4

tritanopia

#cacaef · ΔE00 9.7

Run a whole palette through all three

The twelve nearest named colours

Ranked by CIEDE2000 — perceptual distance, not hex arithmetic. The closest isLink Water at ΔE00 0.913: 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.