HueComb

Earl Grey

#a6978a

A neutral that has no useful hue — it reads as a grey. It is light — black text sits on it comfortably, white text does not.

Hex

#a6978a

RGB

166, 151, 138

OKLCh

68.6% 0.026 63.3°

CIELAB (D50)

63.5, 4.1, 9.0

What is true of this colour, and of no other

  • 14 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 uses only 17% 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 54.4; on black, Lc -47.5. 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 8.3 and 8.8 and 21.0 — no red cone.

Text on this colour

White text

2.83:1 — fails AA

Black text

7.42:1 — passes AA

Black text is the better of the two at7.42:1. That is enough for body text.

As text on white, it needs to change

#837468 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

#a6978a

protanopia

#99998a · ΔE00 8.3

deuteranopia

#9c9c8a · ΔE00 8.8

tritanopia

#9f9f37 · ΔE00 21.0

Run a whole palette through all three

The twelve nearest named colours

Ranked by CIEDE2000 — perceptual distance, not hex arithmetic. The closest isStudio Taupe at ΔE00 0.78: below 1.0 — an ordinary observer cannot tell these apart, even side by side. What the numbers mean.

  • Studio TaupeΔE00 0.78 · #a59789
  • Porcelain FigurinesΔE00 0.841 · #a9998c
  • Sorrel FeltΔE00 0.876 · #a49688
  • CobblestoneΔE00 1.049 · #a89a8e
  • Warm Waterlogged Lab CoatΔE00 1.155 · #a89a8c
  • TuffetΔE00 1.179 · #a59788
  • ZorbaΔE00 1.185 · #a29589
  • ShiitakeΔE00 1.225 · #a5988a
  • StonewareΔE00 1.335 · #a5978d
  • Smoking MirrorΔE00 1.454 · #a29587
  • Parador InnΔE00 1.612 · #a99a8a
  • Chatura BeigeΔE00 1.867 · #a09287

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