Metal
#babfbc
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
#babfbc
RGB
186, 191, 188
OKLCh
80.0% 0.007 160.0°
CIELAB (D50)
76.9, -2.2, 0.9
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 35.2; on black, Lc -67.3. 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.
- tritanopia shifts it by ΔE00 8.8 — no blue cone.
Text on this colour
White text
1.86:1 — fails AA
Black text
11.27:1 — passes AA
Black text is the better of the two at11.27:1. That is enough for body text.
As text on white, it needs to change
#737875 is the nearest colour of the same hue that passes AA on white, at 4.50:1. Only the lightness moved.
The same colour, with one cone missing
As you see it
#babfbc
protanopia
#bebebc · ΔE00 2.6
deuteranopia
#bebebc · ΔE00 2.8
tritanopia
#bdbdca · ΔE00 8.8
The twelve nearest named colours
Ranked by CIEDE2000 — perceptual distance, not hex arithmetic. The closest isQuiet Time at ΔE00 1.004: between 1 and 2 — a trained eye spots it when the two touch; nobody spots it across a room. What the numbers mean.
- Quiet TimeΔE00 1.004 · #b8bcb8
- Rock SolidΔE00 1.226 · #bdc2bd
- Silver Tipped SageΔE00 1.266 · #bfc3bf
- Bay WavesΔE00 1.342 · #bfc2bf
- Monorail SilverΔE00 1.371 · #b8bcbb
- SolsticeΔE00 1.411 · #babdb8
- Silver MineΔE00 1.469 · #bec2c1
- Samovar SilverΔE00 1.59 · #b8bebe
- Polished RockΔE00 1.628 · #bcc3c2
- Alaskan GreyΔE00 1.652 · #bcbebc
- Lunar SurfaceΔE00 1.775 · #b6b9b6
- QuestΔE00 1.797 · #bdc1c1
12 of these have no page of their own: pages exist for the 4,961 colours the dataset marks as good names.