Whisper of Smoke
#cbcecf
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
#cbcecf
RGB
203, 206, 207
OKLCh
84.9% 0.004 219.5°
CIELAB (D50)
82.5, -0.9, -0.9
What is true of this colour, and of no other
- 29 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 26.5; on black, Lc -76.5. 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 5.3 — no blue cone.
Text on this colour
White text
1.58:1 — fails AA
Black text
13.27:1 — passes AA
Black text is the better of the two at13.27:1. That is enough for body text.
As text on white, it needs to change
#747778 is the nearest colour of the same hue that passes AA on white, at 4.50:1. Only the lightness moved.
The same colour, with one cone missing
As you see it
#cbcecf
protanopia
#cececf · ΔE00 1.6
deuteranopia
#cdcdcf · ΔE00 1.7
tritanopia
#cdcdd8 · ΔE00 5.3
The twelve nearest named colours
Ranked by CIEDE2000 — perceptual distance, not hex arithmetic. The closest isManhattan Mist at ΔE00 0.572: below 1.0 — an ordinary observer cannot tell these apart, even side by side. What the numbers mean.
- Manhattan MistΔE00 0.572 · #cccfcf
- Iron FistΔE00 0.702 · #cbcdcd
- Porpoise FinΔE00 0.886 · #c8cbcd
- Loft SpaceΔE00 1.052 · #cbcecd
- Harp StringsΔE00 1.06 · #cbd0d1
- Fragile BlueΔE00 1.121 · #cfd1d3
- Where There Is SmokeΔE00 1.185 · #c7ccce
- Dawn BlueΔE00 1.195 · #cacccb
- Grey PearlΔE00 1.212 · #ced0cf
- AerodynamicΔE00 1.232 · #cacecd
- ElementalΔE00 1.294 · #d0d3d3
- Sacred SpringΔE00 1.298 · #c7cbce
10 of these have no page of their own: pages exist for the 4,961 colours the dataset marks as good names.