HueComb

Smoke and Mirrors

#d9e6e8

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

#d9e6e8

RGB

217, 230, 232

OKLCh

91.6% 0.014 207.9°

CIELAB (D50)

90.3, -4.2, -2.6

What is true of this colour, and of no other

  • 44 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 13.8; on black, Lc -90.1. 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 6.2 and 6.7 and 13.6 — no red cone.

Text on this colour

White text

1.28:1 — fails AA

Black text

16.43:1 — passes AA

Black text is the better of the two at16.43:1. That is enough for body text.

As text on white, it needs to change

#6d797b 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

#d9e6e8

protanopia

#e5e5e8 · ΔE00 6.2

deuteranopia

#e2e2e8 · ΔE00 6.7

tritanopia

#e0e0ff · ΔE00 13.6

Run a whole palette through all three

The twelve nearest named colours

Ranked by CIEDE2000 — perceptual distance, not hex arithmetic. The closest isSoft Blue White at ΔE00 0.22: 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.