Red Baron

#bb0011

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

Hex

#bb0011

RGB

187, 0, 17

OKLCh

49.8% 0.203 27.2°

CIELAB (D50)

39.7, 64.1, 48.8

What is true of this colour, and of no other

  • 10 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 sits exactly on the sRGB boundary: at this lightness and hue the gamut has nothing left, and a wider display would show a more colourful version of it.
  • As text on white it measures APCA Lc 80.4; on black, Lc -21.4. 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.
  • protanopia and deuteranopia and tritanopia shift it by ΔE00 38.2 and 42.5 and 47.0 — no red cone.

Text on this colour

White text

6.73:1 — passes AA

Black text

3.12:1 — large text only

White text is the better of the two at6.73:1. That is enough for body text.

The same colour, with one cone missing

As you see it

#bb0011

protanopia

#434315 · ΔE00 38.2

deuteranopia

#6a6a00 · ΔE00 42.5

tritanopia

#888800 · ΔE00 47.0

Run a whole palette through all three

The twelve nearest named colours

Ranked by CIEDE2000 — perceptual distance, not hex arithmetic. The closest isRed Sentinel at ΔE00 0.723: below 1.0 — an ordinary observer cannot tell these apart, even side by side. What the numbers mean.

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