Ashen Whisper
#646b7a
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
#646b7a
RGB
100, 107, 122
OKLCh
52.7% 0.025 265.6°
CIELAB (D50)
45.0, -0.2, -9.3
What is true of this colour, and of no other
- 9 other named colours sit within ΔE00 2 of it.
- It uses only 10% 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 76.7; on black, Lc -25.1. 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.
- tritanopia shifts it by ΔE00 8.3 — no blue cone.
Text on this colour
White text
5.35:1 — passes AA
Black text
3.93:1 — large text only
White text is the better of the two at5.35:1. That is enough for body text.
The same colour, with one cone missing
As you see it
#646b7a
protanopia
#6a6a7a · ΔE00 3.9
deuteranopia
#69697a · ΔE00 4.1
tritanopia
#68688a · ΔE00 8.3
The twelve nearest named colours
Ranked by CIEDE2000 — perceptual distance, not hex arithmetic. The closest isMagic at ΔE00 0.894: below 1.0 — an ordinary observer cannot tell these apart, even side by side. What the numbers mean.
- MagicΔE00 0.894 · #656b78
- Shutter BlueΔE00 1.401 · #666e7f
- NoctisΔE00 1.416 · #646b77
- NouveauΔE00 1.548 · #686f7e
- Folkstone GreyΔE00 1.569 · #626879
- NostalgicΔE00 1.657 · #666c7e
- Wind CaveΔE00 1.696 · #686c7b
- Blue SariΔE00 1.745 · #666a76
- Hong Kong SkylineΔE00 1.796 · #676e7a
- Alley CatΔE00 2.324 · #656874
- PurebredΔE00 2.361 · #67707d
- British ShorthairΔE00 2.404 · #5f6672
11 of these have no page of their own: pages exist for the 4,961 colours the dataset marks as good names.