Pigeon
#a9afaa
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
#a9afaa
RGB
169, 175, 170
OKLCh
74.8% 0.010 150.6°
CIELAB (D50)
70.9, -2.9, 1.8
What is true of this colour, and of no other
- 11 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 5% 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 44.0; on black, Lc -58.1. 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.
- tritanopia shifts it by ΔE00 10.6 — no blue cone.
Text on this colour
White text
2.23:1 — fails AA
Black text
9.40:1 — passes AA
Black text is the better of the two at9.40:1. That is enough for body text.
As text on white, it needs to change
#737873 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
#a9afaa
protanopia
#aeaeaa · ΔE00 3.1
deuteranopia
#adadaa · ΔE00 3.3
tritanopia
#acacbb · ΔE00 10.6
The twelve nearest named colours
Ranked by CIEDE2000 — perceptual distance, not hex arithmetic. The closest isMineral Deposit at ΔE00 0.804: below 1.0 — an ordinary observer cannot tell these apart, even side by side. What the numbers mean.
- Mineral DepositΔE00 0.804 · #abb0ac
- Silver ScreenΔE00 1.112 · #a6aeaa
- VinalhavenΔE00 1.16 · #acb3ae
- Wintry SkyΔE00 1.326 · #a7afac
- Blue FoxΔE00 1.377 · #acb0a9
- Gull WingΔE00 1.497 · #abaea9
- ArtfulΔE00 1.507 · #a8b1ad
- Fynbos LeafΔE00 1.675 · #aeb1ac
- Puritan GreyΔE00 1.726 · #a8b0ae
- Ginkgo GreenΔE00 1.805 · #a5aca4
- Light DrizzleΔE00 1.986 · #a7aea5
- Silver ChaliceΔE00 2.014 · #acaea9
12 of these have no page of their own: pages exist for the 4,961 colours the dataset marks as good names.