Black Orchid
#525463
A neutral that has no useful hue — it reads as a grey. It is mid — the hardest range to put text on, either colour struggles.
Hex
#525463
RGB
82, 84, 99
OKLCh
45.0% 0.025 279.4°
CIELAB (D50)
36.0, 1.8, -9.0
What is true of this colour, and of no other
- 4 other named colours sit within ΔE00 2 of it.
- It uses only 9% 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 86.0; on black, Lc -16.0. 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
7.48:1 — passes AA
Black text
2.81:1 — fails AA
White text is the better of the two at7.48:1. That is enough for body text.
The same colour, with one cone missing
As you see it
#525463
protanopia
#545463 · ΔE00 1.2
deuteranopia
#535363 · ΔE00 1.2
tritanopia
#535368 · ΔE00 2.8
The twelve nearest named colours
Ranked by CIEDE2000 — perceptual distance, not hex arithmetic. The closest isBlack Dragon’s Cauldron at ΔE00 1.056: between 1 and 2 — a trained eye spots it when the two touch; nobody spots it across a room. What the numbers mean.
- Black Dragon’s CauldronΔE00 1.056 · #545562
- BlackwaterΔE00 1.151 · #545663
- VoyagerΔE00 1.947 · #4d5062
- Night NightΔE00 1.969 · #4f4f5e
- Odyssey GreyΔE00 2.085 · #4c4e5d
- Ombre BlueΔE00 2.489 · #4a4e5d
- Ball GownΔE00 2.53 · #525661
- Receding NightΔE00 2.596 · #4a4e5c
- Mystical ShadeΔE00 2.685 · #4c5364
- Coal TippleΔE00 2.908 · #53555e
- TyrianΔE00 3.028 · #4e4d59
- Shearwater BlackΔE00 3.068 · #5b5b6c
11 of these have no page of their own: pages exist for the 4,961 colours the dataset marks as good names.