Moon Landing
#a7a7a7
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
#a7a7a7
RGB
167, 167, 167
OKLCh
72.8% 0.000 89.9°
CIELAB (D50)
68.5, 0.0, 0.0
What is true of this colour, and of no other
- 22 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 almost none of the chroma available here: this is a grey with a trace of hue rather than a colour.
- As text on white it measures APCA Lc 47.4; on black, Lc -54.6. 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.
- All three dichromacies see it as very nearly the same colour you do: its hue is not the part carrying its identity.
Text on this colour
White text
2.41:1 — fails AA
Black text
8.73:1 — passes AA
Black text is the better of the two at8.73:1. That is enough for body text.
As text on white, it needs to change
#777777 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
#a7a7a7
protanopia
#a7a7a7 · ΔE00 0.0
deuteranopia
#a7a7a7 · ΔE00 0.0
tritanopia
#a7a7a7 · ΔE00 0.0
The twelve nearest named colours
Ranked by CIEDE2000 — perceptual distance, not hex arithmetic. The closest isUniform Grey at ΔE00 0.293: below 1.0 — an ordinary observer cannot tell these apart, even side by side. What the numbers mean.
- Uniform GreyΔE00 0.293 · #a8a8a8
- QuicksilverΔE00 0.295 · #a6a6a6
- Rainy GreyΔE00 0.592 · #a5a5a5
- NosferatuΔE00 0.667 · #a9a8a8
- Dhūsar GreyΔE00 0.875 · #aaaaaa
- Ultimate GreyΔE00 0.921 · #a9a8a9
- Elephant in the RoomΔE00 0.979 · #a8a9a8
- Quartz SandΔE00 1.097 · #a9aaab
- Grey of DarknessΔE00 1.492 · #a2a2a2
- Smokey WingsΔE00 1.515 · #a7a5a3
- Cathedral GreyΔE00 1.58 · #aba9a7
- Shadow of the ColossusΔE00 1.616 · #a3a2a1
8 of these have no page of their own: pages exist for the 4,961 colours the dataset marks as good names.