Whale
#7c8181
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
#7c8181
RGB
124, 129, 129
OKLCh
59.9% 0.006 197.0°
CIELAB (D50)
53.5, -1.9, -0.7
What is true of this colour, and of no other
- 9 other named colours sit within ΔE00 2 of it.
- It uses only 6% 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 66.9; on black, Lc -34.7. 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 8.8 — no blue cone.
Text on this colour
White text
3.95:1 — large text only
Black text
5.31:1 — passes AA
Black text is the better of the two at5.31:1. That is enough for body text.
As text on white, it needs to change
#737878 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
#7c8181
protanopia
#808081 · ΔE00 2.9
deuteranopia
#808081 · ΔE00 3.1
tritanopia
#7f7f8f · ΔE00 8.8
The twelve nearest named colours
Ranked by CIEDE2000 — perceptual distance, not hex arithmetic. The closest isGame Over at ΔE00 1.081: between 1 and 2 — a trained eye spots it when the two touch; nobody spots it across a room. What the numbers mean.
- Game OverΔE00 1.081 · #7e8181
- Legendary SwordΔE00 1.201 · #7f8384
- Shutter GreyΔE00 1.57 · #797f7d
- SoftwareΔE00 1.622 · #7f8486
- Mt. RushmoreΔE00 1.643 · #7f8181
- Scattered ShowersΔE00 1.79 · #7b8285
- Cowboy SpurΔE00 1.816 · #7a7f82
- Storm CloudΔE00 1.926 · #808283
- Iron GreyΔE00 1.99 · #7c7f7c
- IronsideΔE00 2.144 · #7e8082
- Adeptus BattlegreyΔE00 2.196 · #7c8286
- Distant ThunderΔE00 2.208 · #7f8688
10 of these have no page of their own: pages exist for the 4,961 colours the dataset marks as good names.