Head in the Clouds

#d1dde1

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

#d1dde1

RGB

209, 221, 225

OKLCh

89.0% 0.014 219.6°

CIELAB (D50)

87.3, -3.6, -3.4

What is true of this colour, and of no other

  • 34 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 18% 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 18.8; on black, Lc -84.7. 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 5.8 and 6.3 and 14.6 — no red cone.

Text on this colour

White text

1.39:1 — fails AA

Black text

15.14:1 — passes AA

Black text is the better of the two at15.14:1. That is enough for body text.

As text on white, it needs to change

#6e797c 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

#d1dde1

protanopia

#dcdce1 · ΔE00 5.8

deuteranopia

#dadae1 · ΔE00 6.3

tritanopia

#d7d7ff · ΔE00 14.6

Run a whole palette through all three

The twelve nearest named colours

Ranked by CIEDE2000 — perceptual distance, not hex arithmetic. The closest isBlue Nuance at ΔE00 0.559: below 1.0 — an ordinary observer cannot tell these apart, even side by side. What the numbers mean.

  • Blue NuanceΔE00 0.559 · #d2dde0
  • BreakwaterΔE00 0.942 · #d1dee4
  • Hinting BlueΔE00 0.962 · #ced9dd
  • Polar Soft BlueΔE00 0.998 · #d0dcde
  • Wisteria SnowΔE00 1.041 · #ced9dc
  • Pinwheel GeyserΔE00 1.141 · #d2dcde
  • April WindsΔE00 1.272 · #d5e2e5
  • GlassineΔE00 1.295 · #d7e2e5
  • AloofΔE00 1.305 · #d4e2e6
  • Tahoe SnowΔE00 1.319 · #d7e1e5
  • ZenΔE00 1.337 · #cfd9de
  • Bare MintimumΔE00 1.362 · #d6e3e7

10 of these have no page of their own: pages exist for the 4,961 colours the dataset marks as good names.