Serene Sea
#78a7c3
A blue that is nearly neutral — the hue shows only against a true grey. It is light — black text sits on it comfortably, white text does not.
Hex
#78a7c3
RGB
120, 167, 195
OKLCh
70.5% 0.065 235.1°
CIELAB (D50)
65.9, -10.9, -19.7
What is true of this colour, and of no other
- 5 other named colours sit within ΔE00 2 of it.
- It uses 43% of the chroma sRGB can show at this lightness and hue.
- As text on white it measures APCA Lc 50.5; on black, Lc -51.4. 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 16.7 and 16.4 and 13.0 — no red cone.
Text on this colour
White text
2.59:1 — fails AA
Black text
8.11:1 — passes AA
Black text is the better of the two at8.11:1. That is enough for body text.
As text on white, it needs to change
#4e7c97 is the nearest colour of the same hue that passes AA on white, at 4.50:1. Only the lightness moved.
The same colour, with one cone missing
As you see it
#78a7c3
protanopia
#a3a3c3 · ΔE00 16.7
deuteranopia
#9b9bc4 · ΔE00 16.4
tritanopia
#9292ff · ΔE00 13.0
The twelve nearest named colours
Ranked by CIEDE2000 — perceptual distance, not hex arithmetic. The closest isStormfang at ΔE00 1.666: between 1 and 2 — a trained eye spots it when the two touch; nobody spots it across a room. What the numbers mean.
- StormfangΔE00 1.666 · #80a7c1
- Ocean SurfΔE00 1.758 · #79a2bd
- AfloatΔE00 1.874 · #78a3c2
- Soul BlueΔE00 1.888 · #7eadc7
- Wandering RiverΔE00 1.99 · #73a4c6
- Moonstone BlueΔE00 2.07 · #73a9c2
- ArabellaΔE00 2.137 · #82acc4
- Mirror LakeΔE00 2.357 · #7aa8cb
- Air BlueΔE00 2.513 · #69a3c1
- Blue NileΔE00 2.586 · #779fb9
- FateΔE00 2.644 · #6ba0bf
- Air Superiority BlueΔE00 2.674 · #72a0c1
11 of these have no page of their own: pages exist for the 4,961 colours the dataset marks as good names.