Bitter Liquorice
#262926
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
#262926
RGB
38, 41, 38
OKLCh
27.7% 0.007 145.4°
CIELAB (D50)
16.2, -1.9, 1.5
What is true of this colour, and of no other
- No other named colour in the set is within ΔE00 2 of it — it stands alone.
- It uses only 8% 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 101.6; 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.
- tritanopia shifts it by ΔE00 7.1 — no blue cone.
Text on this colour
White text
14.71:1 — passes AA
Black text
1.43:1 — fails AA
White text is the better of the two at14.71:1. That is enough for body text.
The same colour, with one cone missing
As you see it
#262926
protanopia
#292926 · ΔE00 2.1
deuteranopia
#282826 · ΔE00 2.2
tritanopia
#28282e · ΔE00 7.1
The twelve nearest named colours
Ranked by CIEDE2000 — perceptual distance, not hex arithmetic. The closest isBlackadder at ΔE00 2.255: between 2 and 5 — clearly two colours when compared, easily mistaken from memory. What the numbers mean.
- BlackadderΔE00 2.255 · #292c2c
- Graphite BlackΔE00 2.714 · #262a2b
- Dire WolfΔE00 3.05 · #282828
- EternityΔE00 3.056 · #2d2f28
- Chromaphobic BlackΔE00 3.06 · #292929
- The EndΔE00 3.103 · #2a2a2a
- PetroleumΔE00 3.139 · #21211d
- Shoe WaxΔE00 3.178 · #2b2b2b
- NeroΔE00 3.21 · #252525
- MarshlandΔE00 3.271 · #2b2e26
- Melanite Black GreenΔE00 3.302 · #282e27
- OilΔE00 3.328 · #313330
6 of these have no page of their own: pages exist for the 4,961 colours the dataset marks as good names.