After Midnight
#38393f
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
#38393f
RGB
56, 57, 63
OKLCh
34.6% 0.011 278.3°
CIELAB (D50)
24.0, 0.6, -3.9
What is true of this colour, and of no other
- 7 other named colours sit within ΔE00 2 of it.
- It uses only 5% 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 96.5; 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
11.51:1 — passes AA
Black text
1.83:1 — fails AA
White text is the better of the two at11.51:1. That is enough for body text.
The same colour, with one cone missing
As you see it
#38393f
protanopia
#39393f · ΔE00 0.7
deuteranopia
#39393f · ΔE00 0.7
tritanopia
#393942 · ΔE00 1.9
The twelve nearest named colours
Ranked by CIEDE2000 — perceptual distance, not hex arithmetic. The closest isArtist’s Charcoal at ΔE00 0.974: below 1.0 — an ordinary observer cannot tell these apart, even side by side. What the numbers mean.
- Artist’s CharcoalΔE00 0.974 · #37393e
- In the DarkΔE00 1.135 · #3b3c41
- Antarctic DeepΔE00 1.33 · #35383f
- VulcanΔE00 1.544 · #36383c
- Very BlackΔE00 1.56 · #34363e
- MetaliseΔE00 1.728 · #34373c
- Hawk’s EyeΔE00 1.828 · #34363a
- Dark Kettle BlackΔE00 2.022 · #333438
- Blue GraphiteΔE00 2.094 · #3a383f
- Detective ThrillerΔE00 2.112 · #393c40
- CryptΔE00 2.15 · #373b40
- Avocado PeelΔE00 2.194 · #39373b
9 of these have no page of their own: pages exist for the 4,961 colours the dataset marks as good names.