Pastel Yellow

#fdfd96

A yellow that is muted. It is very light — it works as a page background, not as text.

Hex

#fdfd96

RGB

253, 253, 150

OKLCh

97.2% 0.126 108.5°

CIELAB (D50)

97.7, -10.5, 49.1

What is true of this colour, and of no other

  • 3 other named colours sit within ΔE00 2 of it.
  • It uses 82% of the chroma sRGB can show at this lightness and hue.
  • As text on white it measures APCA Lc 0.0; on black, Lc -102.9. 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.
  • 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

1.07:1 — fails AA

Black text

19.67:1 — passes AA

Black text is the better of the two at19.67:1. That is enough for body text.

As text on white, it needs to change

#7d7a00 is the nearest colour of the same hue that passes AA on white, at 4.50:1. Only the lightness moved, and some saturation was given up to stay inside sRGB.

Try it against your own background

The same colour, with one cone missing

As you see it

#fdfd96

protanopia

#fdfd96 · ΔE00 0.0

deuteranopia

#fdfd96 · ΔE00 0.0

tritanopia

#fdfd96 · ΔE00 0.0

Run a whole palette through all three

The twelve nearest named colours

Ranked by CIEDE2000 — perceptual distance, not hex arithmetic. The closest isSunburst Yellow at ΔE00 0.439: 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.