Sugar Quill

#ebe5d7

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

#ebe5d7

RGB

235, 229, 215

OKLCh

92.3% 0.020 87.5°

CIELAB (D50)

91.1, 0.3, 7.6

What is true of this colour, and of no other

  • 166 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 22% 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 12.7; on black, Lc -91.2. 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 8.8 — no blue cone.

Text on this colour

White text

1.26:1 — fails AA

Black text

16.72:1 — passes AA

Black text is the better of the two at16.72:1. That is enough for body text.

As text on white, it needs to change

#7c766a 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

#ebe5d7

protanopia

#e6e6d7 · ΔE00 3.1

deuteranopia

#e7e7d7 · ΔE00 3.3

tritanopia

#e8e8c2 · ΔE00 8.8

Run a whole palette through all three

The twelve nearest named colours

Ranked by CIEDE2000 — perceptual distance, not hex arithmetic. The closest isDry Sand at ΔE00 0.219: below 1.0 — an ordinary observer cannot tell these apart, even side by side. What the numbers mean.

  • Dry SandΔE00 0.219 · #eae4d6
  • Pale LinenΔE00 0.404 · #ebe5d6
  • Marzipan WhiteΔE00 0.412 · #ebe5d8
  • OstrichΔE00 0.438 · #e9e3d5
  • Old Yellow BricksΔE00 0.449 · #ece6d7
  • White SilenceΔE00 0.536 · #ebe6d8
  • HeliumΔE00 0.566 · #eae5d8
  • NacreΔE00 0.658 · #e8e2d4
  • Elusive WhiteΔE00 0.733 · #e8e3d6
  • Historic WhiteΔE00 0.738 · #ebe6d7
  • EdelweissΔE00 0.749 · #eee8d9
  • Jelly YoghurtΔE00 0.789 · #ede6d9

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