Violet Velvet

#b19cd9

A violet that is muted. It is light — black text sits on it comfortably, white text does not.

Hex

#b19cd9

RGB

177, 156, 217

OKLCh

73.3% 0.089 300.0°

CIELAB (D50)

67.9, 17.1, -28.4

What is true of this colour, and of no other

  • One other named colour sits within ΔE00 2 of it.
  • It uses 55% of the chroma sRGB can show at this lightness and hue.
  • As text on white it measures APCA Lc 47.9; on black, Lc -54.1. 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.
  • protanopia and deuteranopia and tritanopia shift it by ΔE00 6.1 and 5.7 and 22.4 — no red cone.

Text on this colour

White text

2.43:1 — fails AA

Black text

8.63:1 — passes AA

Black text is the better of the two at8.63:1. That is enough for body text.

As text on white, it needs to change

#816da6 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

#b19cd9

protanopia

#9f9fd9 · ΔE00 6.1

deuteranopia

#a3a3d9 · ΔE00 5.7

tritanopia

#a7a7a4 · 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 isBiloba Flower at ΔE00 1.404: between 1 and 2 — a trained eye spots it when the two touch; nobody spots it across a room. What the numbers mean.

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