HueComb

Cousteau

#55a9d6

A blue that is muted. It is light — black text sits on it comfortably, white text does not.

Hex

#55a9d6

RGB

85, 169, 214

OKLCh

70.0% 0.105 234.4°

CIELAB (D50)

65.4, -16.4, -31.1

What is true of this colour, and of no other

  • 5 other named colours sit within ΔE00 2 of it.
  • It uses 71% of the chroma sRGB can show at this lightness and hue.
  • As text on white it measures APCA Lc 50.8; on black, Lc -51.1. 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.
  • protanopia and deuteranopia and tritanopia shift it by ΔE00 20.1 and 19.3 and 18.3 — no red cone.

Text on this colour

White text

2.61:1 — fails AA

Black text

8.03:1 — passes AA

Black text is the better of the two at8.03:1. That is enough for body text.

As text on white, it needs to change

#257faa is the nearest colour of the same hue that passes AA on white, at 4.50:1. Only the lightness moved.

Try it against your own background

The same colour, with one cone missing

As you see it

#55a9d6

protanopia

#a2a2d6 · ΔE00 20.1

deuteranopia

#9696d7 · ΔE00 19.3

tritanopia

#8888ff · ΔE00 18.3

Run a whole palette through all three

The twelve nearest named colours

Ranked by CIEDE2000 — perceptual distance, not hex arithmetic. The closest isHoeth Blue at ΔE00 0.458: below 1.0 — an ordinary observer cannot tell these apart, even side by side. What the numbers mean.

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