HueComb

Smell of Garlic

#d9ddcb

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

#d9ddcb

RGB

217, 221, 203

OKLCh

88.9% 0.025 117.1°

CIELAB (D50)

87.4, -3.8, 8.4

What is true of this colour, and of no other

  • 33 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 12% 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.
  • tritanopia shifts it by ΔE00 6.6 — no blue cone.

Text on this colour

White text

1.39:1 — fails AA

Black text

15.16:1 — passes AA

Black text is the better of the two at15.16:1. That is enough for body text.

As text on white, it needs to change

#757868 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

#d9ddcb

protanopia

#ddddcb · ΔE00 1.9

deuteranopia

#dcdccb · ΔE00 2.0

tritanopia

#dbdbd8 · ΔE00 6.6

Run a whole palette through all three

The twelve nearest named colours

Ranked by CIEDE2000 — perceptual distance, not hex arithmetic. The closest isLiberated Lime at ΔE00 0.583: 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.