Mediterranean Sea

#1e8cab

A cyan that is muted. It is mid — the hardest range to put text on, either colour struggles.

Hex

#1e8cab

RGB

30, 140, 171

OKLCh

59.6% 0.103 222.4°

CIELAB (D50)

53.6, -22.3, -25.4

What is true of this colour, and of no other

  • 8 other named colours sit within ΔE00 2 of it.
  • It uses 93% of the chroma sRGB can show at this lightness and hue — close enough to the boundary that a wider display would show it slightly more vividly.
  • As text on white it measures APCA Lc 65.9; on black, Lc -35.7. 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 23.1 and 22.5 and 23.0 — no red cone.

Text on this colour

White text

3.89:1 — large text only

Black text

5.39:1 — passes AA

Black text is the better of the two at5.39:1. That is enough for body text.

As text on white, it needs to change

#0581a0 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

#1e8cab

protanopia

#8585ab · ΔE00 23.1

deuteranopia

#7878ac · ΔE00 22.5

tritanopia

#6868ff · ΔE00 23.0

Run a whole palette through all three

The twelve nearest named colours

Ranked by CIEDE2000 — perceptual distance, not hex arithmetic. The closest isAlgiers Blue at ΔE00 1.134: between 1 and 2 — a trained eye spots it when the two touch; nobody spots it across a room. What the numbers mean.

  • Algiers BlueΔE00 1.134 · #008db0
  • QuintanaΔE00 1.378 · #008ca9
  • Corfu WatersΔE00 1.394 · #008aad
  • Capri BreezeΔE00 1.481 · #0089a8
  • Cool TideΔE00 1.868 · #0091b3
  • CarolΔE00 1.879 · #338dae
  • Tiny BubblesΔE00 1.916 · #0088ab
  • ZeftronΔE00 1.92 · #0090ad
  • Caribbean SeaΔE00 2.054 · #0087a7
  • Hacienda BlueΔE00 2.065 · #0087a8
  • Kelp’thar Forest BlueΔE00 2.619 · #0092ae
  • Magic BlueΔE00 2.625 · #3e8baa

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