Cacodemon Red

#9f0000

A red that is saturated. It is mid — the hardest range to put text on, either colour struggles.

Hex

#9f0000

RGB

159, 0, 0

OKLCh

44.1% 0.181 29.2°

CIELAB (D50)

33.4, 56.8, 48.4

What is true of this colour, and of no other

  • 13 other named colours sit within ΔE00 2 of it — this part of the space is crowded, and the names here are finer distinctions than most people make.
  • It sits exactly on the sRGB boundary: at this lightness and hue the gamut has nothing left, and a wider display would show a more colourful version of it.
  • As text on white it measures APCA Lc 86.6; on black, Lc -15.5. 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 35.7 and 38.2 and 41.8 — no red cone.

Text on this colour

White text

8.49:1 — passes AA

Black text

2.47:1 — fails AA

White text is the better of the two at8.49:1. That is enough for body text.

The same colour, with one cone missing

As you see it

#9f0000

protanopia

#383805 · ΔE00 35.7

deuteranopia

#5a5a00 · ΔE00 38.2

tritanopia

#737300 · ΔE00 41.8

Run a whole palette through all three

The twelve nearest named colours

Ranked by CIEDE2000 — perceptual distance, not hex arithmetic. The closest isDragon Red at ΔE00 0.192: below 1.0 — an ordinary observer cannot tell these apart, even side by side. What the numbers mean.

  • Dragon RedΔE00 0.192 · #9e0200
  • Megido RedΔE00 0.408 · #a10000
  • Bloodthirsty VampireΔE00 0.876 · #9b0503
  • Deep RedΔE00 0.965 · #9a0200
  • Stanger RedΔE00 1.019 · #a40000
  • Gory RedΔE00 1.16 · #a30800
  • OU Crimson RedΔE00 1.224 · #990000
  • Dramatical RedΔE00 1.422 · #991100
  • Red PentacleΔE00 1.426 · #a60000
  • Cavalry BrownΔE00 1.454 · #990003
  • Crimson RedΔE00 1.48 · #980001
  • Totem PoleΔE00 1.894 · #991b07

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