Snow Blanket

#dde3e8

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

#dde3e8

RGB

221, 227, 232

OKLCh

91.3% 0.009 242.8°

CIELAB (D50)

89.9, -1.4, -3.2

What is true of this colour, and of no other

  • 45 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 20% 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 14.6; on black, Lc -89.2. 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 8.9 — no blue cone.

Text on this colour

White text

1.29:1 — fails AA

Black text

16.23:1 — passes AA

Black text is the better of the two at16.23:1. That is enough for body text.

As text on white, it needs to change

#72777c 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

#dde3e8

protanopia

#e2e2e8 · ΔE00 3.1

deuteranopia

#e1e1e8 · ΔE00 3.3

tritanopia

#e0e0f8 · ΔE00 8.9

Run a whole palette through all three

The twelve nearest named colours

Ranked by CIEDE2000 — perceptual distance, not hex arithmetic. The closest isWind Blown at ΔE00 0.481: below 1.0 — an ordinary observer cannot tell these apart, even side by side. What the numbers mean.

  • Wind BlownΔE00 0.481 · #dde3e7
  • Crystal BayΔE00 0.538 · #dbe2e7
  • Bright StarΔE00 0.619 · #dde2e6
  • Milk BlueΔE00 0.744 · #dce3e7
  • Elusive BlueΔE00 0.758 · #dde4e8
  • Eastern BreezeΔE00 0.811 · #dae0e6
  • Winter HavenΔE00 0.853 · #e1e6eb
  • Pearl CityΔE00 0.923 · #dce4e9
  • City LightsΔE00 0.952 · #dfe6ea
  • Bleached WhiteΔE00 0.961 · #dfe3e8
  • Cold LightΔE00 0.969 · #dde3e6
  • Cosmic DustΔE00 0.999 · #dce2e5

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