Quicksand

#ac9884

An orange that is nearly neutral — the hue shows only against a true grey. It is light — black text sits on it comfortably, white text does not.

Hex

#ac9884

RGB

172, 152, 132

OKLCh

69.2% 0.037 67.1°

CIELAB (D50)

64.2, 5.3, 13.4

What is true of this colour, and of no other

  • 15 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 24% 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 53.5; on black, Lc -48.4. 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 10.5 and 11.0 and 22.4 — no red cone.

Text on this colour

White text

2.77:1 — fails AA

Black text

7.58:1 — passes AA

Black text is the better of the two at7.58:1. That is enough for body text.

As text on white, it needs to change

#877360 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

#ac9884

protanopia

#9a9a84 · ΔE00 10.5

deuteranopia

#9e9e83 · ΔE00 11.0

tritanopia

#a2a200 · ΔE00 22.4

Run a whole palette through all three

The twelve nearest named colours

Ranked by CIEDE2000 — perceptual distance, not hex arithmetic. The closest isSilent Sands at ΔE00 1.018: between 1 and 2 — a trained eye spots it when the two touch; nobody spots it across a room. What the numbers mean.

  • Silent SandsΔE00 1.018 · #a99582
  • Adolescent RodentΔE00 1.02 · #a99681
  • Mocha TanΔE00 1.074 · #ac9680
  • Chocolate Cream PieΔE00 1.113 · #a89581
  • Majestic ElkΔE00 1.195 · #ad9a84
  • Pure EarthΔE00 1.413 · #a79480
  • Weathered WoodΔE00 1.47 · #b19c86
  • Woodland StoneΔE00 1.51 · #b09b89
  • Over the TaupeΔE00 1.577 · #b09d8a
  • Mexican SandΔE00 1.589 · #af9781
  • Threshold TaupeΔE00 1.693 · #ac9a8a
  • Easily SuedeΔE00 1.781 · #b29d8a

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