White Frost

#dee6ec

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

#dee6ec

RGB

222, 230, 236

OKLCh

92.1% 0.012 239.9°

CIELAB (D50)

90.8, -1.9, -3.9

What is true of this colour, and of no other

  • 41 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 28% 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 13.0; on black, Lc -90.9. 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 10.2 — no blue cone.

Text on this colour

White text

1.26:1 — fails AA

Black text

16.64:1 — passes AA

Black text is the better of the two at16.64:1. That is enough for body text.

As text on white, it needs to change

#71787d 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

#dee6ec

protanopia

#e5e5ec · ΔE00 4.0

deuteranopia

#e4e4ec · ΔE00 4.3

tritanopia

#e2e2ff · ΔE00 10.2

Run a whole palette through all three

The twelve nearest named colours

Ranked by CIEDE2000 — perceptual distance, not hex arithmetic. The closest isMystic Light at ΔE00 0.508: below 1.0 — an ordinary observer cannot tell these apart, even side by side. What the numbers mean.

  • Mystic LightΔE00 0.508 · #dde5ec
  • Diamond LightΔE00 0.513 · #dfe7ec
  • SnowcapΔE00 0.519 · #dce5eb
  • Morning HazeΔE00 0.633 · #e0e8ed
  • Pearl CityΔE00 0.651 · #dce4e9
  • Bellflower BlueΔE00 0.653 · #e1e9ef
  • Chapeau VioletΔE00 0.744 · #dee5ec
  • Early FrostΔE00 0.839 · #dae3e9
  • Himalaya PeaksΔE00 0.868 · #e2eaf0
  • City LightsΔE00 0.945 · #dfe6ea
  • Cloud AbyssΔE00 0.966 · #dfe7eb
  • Star MapΔE00 0.988 · #dae2e9

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