Closet Skeletons

#e1ded9

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

#e1ded9

RGB

225, 222, 217

OKLCh

90.1% 0.007 80.7°

CIELAB (D50)

88.6, 0.4, 2.8

What is true of this colour, and of no other

  • 84 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 8% 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 16.8; on black, Lc -86.8. 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 5.2 — no blue cone.

Text on this colour

White text

1.34:1 — fails AA

Black text

15.65:1 — passes AA

Black text is the better of the two at15.65:1. That is enough for body text.

As text on white, it needs to change

#797672 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

#e1ded9

protanopia

#deded9 · ΔE00 1.6

deuteranopia

#dfdfd9 · ΔE00 1.7

tritanopia

#dfdfcf · ΔE00 5.2

Run a whole palette through all three

The twelve nearest named colours

Ranked by CIEDE2000 — perceptual distance, not hex arithmetic. The closest isHush Grey at ΔE00 0.478: below 1.0 — an ordinary observer cannot tell these apart, even side by side. What the numbers mean.

  • Hush GreyΔE00 0.478 · #e1ded8
  • Prelude to PinkΔE00 0.489 · #e1deda
  • Poetic LightΔE00 0.623 · #e2ded8
  • SnowfallΔE00 0.639 · #e0deda
  • Granular LimestoneΔE00 0.643 · #e3e0da
  • SpectralΔE00 0.654 · #dfdcd8
  • Pheasant’s EggΔE00 0.659 · #e0dcd7
  • House Martin EggsΔE00 0.662 · #e2e0db
  • Vista WhiteΔE00 0.672 · #e3dfd9
  • GhostedΔE00 0.761 · #e2e0dc
  • SeagullΔE00 0.783 · #e0ded8
  • Timid LimeΔE00 0.784 · #e4e0da

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