HueComb

Swan Dive

#e5e4dd

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

#e5e4dd

RGB

229, 228, 221

OKLCh

91.8% 0.009 100.0°

CIELAB (D50)

90.5, -0.6, 3.6

What is true of this colour, and of no other

  • 106 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 5% 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 13.6; on black, Lc -90.2. 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.
  • All three dichromacies see it as very nearly the same colour you do: its hue is not the part carrying its identity.

Text on this colour

White text

1.27:1 — fails AA

Black text

16.47:1 — passes AA

Black text is the better of the two at16.47:1. That is enough for body text.

As text on white, it needs to change

#787771 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

#e5e4dd

protanopia

#e4e4dd · ΔE00 0.5

deuteranopia

#e4e4dd · ΔE00 0.6

tritanopia

#e4e4da · ΔE00 1.7

Run a whole palette through all three

The twelve nearest named colours

Ranked by CIEDE2000 — perceptual distance, not hex arithmetic. The closest isSpare White at ΔE00 0.521: 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.