HueComb

Plein Air

#b9c4d2

A neutral that has no useful hue — it reads as a grey. It is very light — it works as a page background, not as text.

Hex

#b9c4d2

RGB

185, 196, 210

OKLCh

81.6% 0.023 254.4°

CIELAB (D50)

78.6, -1.8, -8.4

What is true of this colour, and of no other

  • 17 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 25% 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 32.4; on black, Lc -70.3. 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 5.5 and 5.9 and 11.3 — no red cone.

Text on this colour

White text

1.77:1 — fails AA

Black text

11.89:1 — passes AA

Black text is the better of the two at11.89:1. That is enough for body text.

As text on white, it needs to change

#6e7884 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

#b9c4d2

protanopia

#c3c3d2 · ΔE00 5.5

deuteranopia

#c1c1d2 · ΔE00 5.9

tritanopia

#bfbfed · ΔE00 11.3

Run a whole palette through all three

The twelve nearest named colours

Ranked by CIEDE2000 — perceptual distance, not hex arithmetic. The closest isHyacinth Tint at ΔE00 0.424: below 1.0 — an ordinary observer cannot tell these apart, even side by side. What the numbers mean.

  • Hyacinth TintΔE00 0.424 · #b9c4d3
  • StargateΔE00 0.803 · #b7c4d3
  • Pageant SongΔE00 0.918 · #b6c3d1
  • Angelic BlueΔE00 0.992 · #bbc6d6
  • BypassΔE00 1.26 · #b6c4d2
  • CandelaΔE00 1.468 · #bac4d5
  • Light Pearl Soft BlueΔE00 1.524 · #bec8d8
  • Northern ExposureΔE00 1.553 · #bfc7d4
  • HazyΔE00 1.611 · #b4c2cf
  • IcyΔE00 1.645 · #bbc7d2
  • Blue DolphinΔE00 1.719 · #bcc5cf
  • Dancing MistΔE00 1.814 · #bfc8d8

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