Deepest Nightmare

#44413c

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

#44413c

RGB

68, 65, 60

OKLCh

37.7% 0.009 80.7°

CIELAB (D50)

27.7, 0.5, 3.5

What is true of this colour, and of no other

  • 9 other named colours sit within ΔE00 2 of it.
  • It uses only 12% 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 93.6; on black, Lc -8.9. 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 6.8 — no blue cone.

Text on this colour

White text

10.16:1 — passes AA

Black text

2.07:1 — fails AA

White text is the better of the two at10.16:1. That is enough for body text.

The same colour, with one cone missing

As you see it

#44413c

protanopia

#41413c · ΔE00 2.0

deuteranopia

#42423c · ΔE00 2.2

tritanopia

#424231 · ΔE00 6.8

Run a whole palette through all three

The twelve nearest named colours

Ranked by CIEDE2000 — perceptual distance, not hex arithmetic. The closest isPasilla Chiles at ΔE00 0.576: below 1.0 — an ordinary observer cannot tell these apart, even side by side. What the numbers mean.

  • Pasilla ChilesΔE00 0.576 · #44413b
  • November StormsΔE00 0.868 · #423f3b
  • JoesmithiteΔE00 0.994 · #433f39
  • Scorched EarthΔE00 1.505 · #44403d
  • Skavenblight DingeΔE00 1.891 · #47413b
  • Evening CanyonΔE00 1.923 · #454341
  • SealskinΔE00 1.946 · #48423c
  • Whiskey and WineΔE00 1.965 · #49463f
  • Volcanic Stone GreenΔE00 1.976 · #45433b
  • Ebony KeysΔE00 2.057 · #4a4741
  • Off BroadwayΔE00 2.135 · #433f3d
  • Knights of the DesertΔE00 2.138 · #403c39

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