Far Horizons

#7fa2bf

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

#7fa2bf

RGB

127, 162, 191

OKLCh

69.7% 0.058 243.7°

CIELAB (D50)

64.8, -7.1, -19.1

What is true of this colour, and of no other

  • 4 other named colours sit within ΔE00 2 of it.
  • It uses only 34% 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 52.1; on black, Lc -49.8. 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 13.6 and 13.4 and 9.6 — no red cone.

Text on this colour

White text

2.68:1 — fails AA

Black text

7.82:1 — passes AA

Black text is the better of the two at7.82:1. That is enough for body text.

As text on white, it needs to change

#597a96 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

#7fa2bf

protanopia

#9f9fbf · ΔE00 13.6

deuteranopia

#9999c0 · ΔE00 13.4

tritanopia

#9292fc · ΔE00 9.6

Run a whole palette through all three

The twelve nearest named colours

Ranked by CIEDE2000 — perceptual distance, not hex arithmetic. The closest isOld Faithful at ΔE00 0.742: below 1.0 — an ordinary observer cannot tell these apart, even side by side. What the numbers mean.

  • Old FaithfulΔE00 0.742 · #82a2be
  • Hawaiian SkyΔE00 1.013 · #83a2bd
  • AfloatΔE00 1.751 · #78a3c2
  • Ocean SurfΔE00 1.936 · #79a2bd
  • Key West ZenithΔE00 2.101 · #759fc1
  • StormfangΔE00 2.173 · #80a7c1
  • Blue MountainΔE00 2.199 · #759dbe
  • SeaborneΔE00 2.242 · #7aa5c9
  • Blue NileΔE00 2.318 · #779fb9
  • High TideΔE00 2.342 · #85a6c8
  • Walden PondΔE00 2.345 · #789bb6
  • Madam ButterflyΔE00 2.483 · #7ca7cb

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