Lacquered Liquorice
#383838
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
#383838
RGB
56, 56, 56
OKLCh
34.1% 0.000 89.9°
CIELAB (D50)
23.5, 0.0, 0.0
What is true of this colour, and of no other
- 23 other named colours sit within ΔE00 2 of it — this part of the space is crowded, and the names here are finer distinctions than most people make.
- 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 97.0; 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
11.73:1 — passes AA
Black text
1.79:1 — fails AA
White text is the better of the two at11.73:1. That is enough for body text.
The same colour, with one cone missing
As you see it
#383838
protanopia
#383838 · ΔE00 0.0
deuteranopia
#383838 · ΔE00 0.0
tritanopia
#383838 · ΔE00 0.0
The twelve nearest named colours
Ranked by CIEDE2000 — perceptual distance, not hex arithmetic. The closest isBoltgun Metal at ΔE00 0.325: below 1.0 — an ordinary observer cannot tell these apart, even side by side. What the numbers mean.
- Boltgun MetalΔE00 0.325 · #393939
- Dark SummoningΔE00 0.667 · #383839
- Dark GreyΔE00 0.786 · #363737
- Dead PixelΔE00 0.991 · #3b3a3a
- Black LiquoriceΔE00 1.126 · #3a3b3b
- JetΔE00 1.293 · #343434
- Pirate BlackΔE00 1.338 · #363838
- Yin MistΔE00 1.402 · #3b3c3c
- Shisha CoalΔE00 1.468 · #3c3b3c
- Sayward PineΔE00 1.573 · #383739
- Limousine LeatherΔE00 1.573 · #3b3c3b
- CarbonΔE00 1.614 · #333333
10 of these have no page of their own: pages exist for the 4,961 colours the dataset marks as good names.