French Blue
#0072bb
A blue that is muted. It is mid — the hardest range to put text on, either colour struggles.
Hex
#0072bb
RGB
0, 114, 187
OKLCh
53.8% 0.142 247.2°
CIELAB (D50)
45.7, -5.9, -46.8
What is true of this colour, and of no other
- 9 other named colours sit within ΔE00 2 of it.
- It sits exactly on the sRGB boundary: at this lightness and hue the gamut has nothing left, and a wider display would show a more colourful version of it.
- As text on white it measures APCA Lc 74.5; on black, Lc -27.3. 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.
- protanopia and deuteranopia and tritanopia shift it by ΔE00 16.8 and 16.3 and 16.7 — no red cone.
Text on this colour
White text
5.09:1 — passes AA
Black text
4.12:1 — large text only
White text is the better of the two at5.09:1. That is enough for body text.
The same colour, with one cone missing
As you see it
#0072bb
protanopia
#6c6cbb · ΔE00 16.8
deuteranopia
#6161bc · ΔE00 16.3
tritanopia
#5252ff · ΔE00 16.7
The twelve nearest named colours
Ranked by CIEDE2000 — perceptual distance, not hex arithmetic. The closest isPeek-A-Boo Blue at ΔE00 0.399: below 1.0 — an ordinary observer cannot tell these apart, even side by side. What the numbers mean.
- Peek-A-Boo BlueΔE00 0.399 · #0173bb
- Spanish BlueΔE00 0.755 · #0070b8
- Cobalt GlazeΔE00 1.065 · #0072b5
- Biloxi BlueΔE00 1.571 · #0075b8
- PlanetariumΔE00 1.783 · #1c70ad
- Post ItΔE00 1.84 · #0074b4
- Ocean Boat BlueΔE00 1.902 · #0077be
- Bumangués BlueΔE00 1.945 · #0777bc
- DaphneΔE00 1.992 · #116db1
- Beautiful BlueΔE00 2.217 · #186db6
- BluishΔE00 2.235 · #2976bb
- Roller Coaster ChariotΔE00 2.31 · #0078be
12 of these have no page of their own: pages exist for the 4,961 colours the dataset marks as good names.