HueComb

Droplet

#aaddff

A blue that is nearly neutral — the hue shows only against a true grey. It is very light — it works as a page background, not as text.

Hex

#aaddff

RGB

170, 221, 255

OKLCh

87.4% 0.071 237.8°

CIELAB (D50)

85.4, -11.1, -22.2

What is true of this colour, and of no other

  • No other named colour in the set is within ΔE00 2 of it — it stands alone.
  • 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 21.4; on black, Lc -82.0. 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 16.7 and 16.0 and 15.4 — no red cone.

Text on this colour

White text

1.45:1 — fails AA

Black text

14.50:1 — passes AA

Black text is the better of the two at14.50:1. That is enough for body text.

As text on white, it needs to change

#4c7c9b 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

#aaddff

protanopia

#d8d8ff · ΔE00 16.7

deuteranopia

#d0d0ff · ΔE00 16.0

tritanopia

#c6c6ff · ΔE00 15.4

Run a whole palette through all three

The twelve nearest named colours

Ranked by CIEDE2000 — perceptual distance, not hex arithmetic. The closest isMalmö FF at ΔE00 2.343: between 2 and 5 — clearly two colours when compared, easily mistaken from memory. What the numbers mean.

  • Malmö FFΔE00 2.343 · #a7d7ff
  • Endless HorizonΔE00 2.428 · #b1dbf5
  • Columbia BlueΔE00 2.734 · #9bddff
  • Shiva BlueΔE00 2.755 · #99dbfe
  • Juzcar BlueΔE00 2.763 · #a1d5f1
  • Frozen LandscapeΔE00 2.824 · #aee4ff
  • Light ShimmerΔE00 2.923 · #a3d4ef
  • Blue RiceΔE00 2.958 · #b3d9f3
  • Gas GiantΔE00 2.999 · #98dcff
  • Arctic ParadiseΔE00 3.074 · #b8dff8
  • Fairy SparklesΔE00 3.336 · #b0e0f7
  • Marzena DreamΔE00 3.45 · #a6d0ec

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