HueComb

Cathedral

#acaaa7

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

#acaaa7

RGB

172, 170, 167

OKLCh

73.9% 0.005 78.3°

CIELAB (D50)

69.7, 0.3, 1.8

What is true of this colour, and of no other

  • 18 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 45.7; on black, Lc -56.4. 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.
  • 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

2.32:1 — fails AA

Black text

9.06:1 — passes AA

Black text is the better of the two at9.06:1. That is enough for body text.

As text on white, it needs to change

#787674 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

#acaaa7

protanopia

#aaaaa7 · ΔE00 1.2

deuteranopia

#ababa7 · ΔE00 1.2

tritanopia

#ababa1 · ΔE00 3.9

Run a whole palette through all three

The twelve nearest named colours

Ranked by CIEDE2000 — perceptual distance, not hex arithmetic. The closest isCathedral Grey at ΔE00 0.597: below 1.0 — an ordinary observer cannot tell these apart, even side by side. What the numbers mean.

  • Cathedral GreyΔE00 0.597 · #aba9a7
  • Ellie GreyΔE00 1.314 · #aaa9a4
  • Actor’s StarΔE00 1.355 · #a7a6a3
  • Silver GreyΔE00 1.504 · #a8a8a4
  • City TowerΔE00 1.537 · #aeaba5
  • Smokey WingsΔE00 1.54 · #a7a5a3
  • Proper GreyΔE00 1.67 · #ada8a5
  • Classic GreyscaleΔE00 1.685 · #acaca7
  • NosferatuΔE00 1.729 · #a9a8a8
  • Duct Tape GreyΔE00 1.745 · #aeacac
  • Bashful EmuΔE00 1.763 · #b2b0ac
  • Dhūsar GreyΔE00 1.805 · #aaaaaa

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