Lead

#212121

A neutral that has no useful hue — it reads as a grey. It is dark — it carries white text and needs care with black.

Hex

#212121

RGB

33, 33, 33

OKLCh

24.8% 0.000 0.0°

CIELAB (D50)

12.7, 0.0, 0.0

What is true of this colour, and of no other

  • 6 other named colours sit within ΔE00 2 of it.
  • It uses almost none of the chroma available here: this is a grey with a trace of hue rather than a colour.
  • As text on white it measures APCA Lc 103.1; on black, Lc 0.0. 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

16.10:1 — passes AA

Black text

1.30:1 — fails AA

White text is the better of the two at16.10:1. That is enough for body text.

The same colour, with one cone missing

As you see it

#212121

protanopia

#212121 · ΔE00 0.0

deuteranopia

#212121 · ΔE00 0.0

tritanopia

#212121 · 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 isYoung Night at ΔE00 0.629: below 1.0 — an ordinary observer cannot tell these apart, even side by side. What the numbers mean.

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