Rustling Leaves

#ad6961

A red that is muted. It is mid — the hardest range to put text on, either colour struggles.

Hex

#ad6961

RGB

173, 105, 97

OKLCh

59.3% 0.089 27.3°

CIELAB (D50)

52.0, 27.3, 16.7

What is true of this colour, and of no other

  • 9 other named colours sit within ΔE00 2 of it.
  • It uses only 37% 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 69.0; on black, Lc -32.7. 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 25.5 and 27.1 and 36.9 — no red cone.

Text on this colour

White text

4.23:1 — large text only

Black text

4.97:1 — passes AA

Black text is the better of the two at4.97:1. That is enough for body text.

As text on white, it needs to change

#a8655d 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

#ad6961

protanopia

#737361 · ΔE00 25.5

deuteranopia

#82825f · ΔE00 27.1

tritanopia

#909000 · ΔE00 36.9

Run a whole palette through all three

The twelve nearest named colours

Ranked by CIEDE2000 — perceptual distance, not hex arithmetic. The closest isBrick Dust at ΔE00 0.676: below 1.0 — an ordinary observer cannot tell these apart, even side by side. What the numbers mean.

  • Brick DustΔE00 0.676 · #ab685f
  • BrickyardΔE00 1.043 · #ab6a64
  • Peach DunesΔE00 1.591 · #b3695f
  • Scene StealerΔE00 1.665 · #af6d62
  • Melon TwistΔE00 1.727 · #aa6864
  • Henna ShadeΔE00 1.785 · #b3675d
  • Jabłoński BrownΔE00 1.879 · #ad6d68
  • Coral TreeΔE00 1.88 · #ab6e67
  • Preserved PetalsΔE00 1.989 · #b0655a
  • Pineapple BlossomΔE00 2.159 · #b4655c
  • MudbrickΔE00 2.185 · #a46960
  • Copper PennyΔE00 2.22 · #ad6f69

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