Cortex

#a99592

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

#a99592

RGB

169, 149, 146

OKLCh

68.7% 0.024 27.9°

CIELAB (D50)

63.4, 7.3, 4.5

What is true of this colour, and of no other

  • 8 other named colours sit within ΔE00 2 of it.
  • It uses only 12% 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 -47.4. 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 10.3 and 11.4 and 29.5 — no red cone.

Text on this colour

White text

2.84:1 — fails AA

Black text

7.40:1 — passes AA

Black text is the better of the two at7.40:1. That is enough for body text.

As text on white, it needs to change

#867270 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

#a99592

protanopia

#979792 · ΔE00 10.3

deuteranopia

#9b9b92 · ΔE00 11.4

tritanopia

#9f9f00 · ΔE00 29.5

Run a whole palette through all three

The twelve nearest named colours

Ranked by CIEDE2000 — perceptual distance, not hex arithmetic. The closest isSphinx at ΔE00 0.482: below 1.0 — an ordinary observer cannot tell these apart, even side by side. What the numbers mean.

  • SphinxΔE00 0.482 · #a99593
  • Smoky SunriseΔE00 0.869 · #aa9793
  • MonkeypodΔE00 1.045 · #ac9894
  • TribecaΔE00 1.535 · #a4918d
  • LavenbrunΔE00 1.64 · #af9894
  • Fall HeliotropeΔE00 1.752 · #a49491
  • TrilliumΔE00 1.791 · #a89896
  • Tricycle TaupeΔE00 1.982 · #b09994
  • Heirloom OrchidΔE00 2.048 · #ae9999
  • Roman SnailΔE00 2.088 · #a49593
  • EthereaΔE00 2.43 · #a3928c
  • Powdered BrickΔE00 2.49 · #ac9b9b

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