Buff It

#d9cfbe

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

#d9cfbe

RGB

217, 207, 190

OKLCh

85.8% 0.026 81.1°

CIELAB (D50)

83.6, 1.5, 9.8

What is true of this colour, and of no other

  • 49 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 25.0; on black, Lc -78.1. 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 5.2 and 5.4 and 13.4 — no red cone.

Text on this colour

White text

1.54:1 — fails AA

Black text

13.62:1 — passes AA

Black text is the better of the two at13.62:1. That is enough for body text.

As text on white, it needs to change

#7f7666 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

#d9cfbe

protanopia

#d0d0be · ΔE00 5.2

deuteranopia

#d2d2be · ΔE00 5.4

tritanopia

#d4d496 · ΔE00 13.4

Run a whole palette through all three

The twelve nearest named colours

Ranked by CIEDE2000 — perceptual distance, not hex arithmetic. The closest isCrushed Silk at ΔE00 0.501: below 1.0 — an ordinary observer cannot tell these apart, even side by side. What the numbers mean.

  • Crushed SilkΔE00 0.501 · #d8cfbe
  • ClamΔE00 0.656 · #dad1c0
  • Cotton FibreΔE00 0.814 · #dad0bd
  • Sandy ClayΔE00 0.818 · #dbd0bd
  • Cool ConcreteΔE00 0.839 · #d9d0c1
  • Perfect CrustΔE00 0.915 · #d6cdbb
  • Plymouth BeigeΔE00 0.947 · #ddd3c2
  • Gentle ShadowsΔE00 1.04 · #d6cbba
  • Roman PlasterΔE00 1.061 · #ddd2bf
  • ErosionΔE00 1.074 · #ddd1bf
  • Aged BeigeΔE00 1.074 · #d7cfc0
  • Tern GreyΔE00 1.108 · #d5cdbd

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