Black Panther

#424242

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

#424242

RGB

66, 66, 66

OKLCh

37.9% 0.000 89.9°

CIELAB (D50)

28.0, 0.0, 0.0

What is true of this colour, and of no other

  • 24 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 93.4; on black, Lc -9.1. 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

10.05:1 — passes AA

Black text

2.09:1 — fails AA

White text is the better of the two at10.05:1. That is enough for body text.

The same colour, with one cone missing

As you see it

#424242

protanopia

#424242 · ΔE00 0.0

deuteranopia

#424242 · ΔE00 0.0

tritanopia

#424242 · 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 isGoshawk Grey at ΔE00 0.666: below 1.0 — an ordinary observer cannot tell these apart, even side by side. What the numbers mean.

  • Goshawk GreyΔE00 0.666 · #444444
  • Black SuedeΔE00 0.719 · #434342
  • Scarabaeus SacerΔE00 0.889 · #414040
  • Medium BlackΔE00 0.913 · #444443
  • BauhausΔE00 0.99 · #3f4040
  • Machine Gun MetalΔE00 1 · #454545
  • Spade BlackΔE00 1.018 · #424142
  • Totally BlackΔE00 1.11 · #3f4041
  • Greenish BlackΔE00 1.243 · #454445
  • Wood CharcoalΔE00 1.335 · #464646
  • OnyxΔE00 1.353 · #464544
  • Black LacquerΔE00 1.416 · #3f3e3e

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