Silence Is Golden

#c2a06d

An orange that is nearly neutral — the hue shows only against a true grey. It is light — black text sits on it comfortably, white text does not.

Hex

#c2a06d

RGB

194, 160, 109

OKLCh

72.5% 0.079 77.1°

CIELAB (D50)

68.1, 8.0, 31.5

What is true of this colour, and of no other

  • 13 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 52% of the chroma sRGB can show at this lightness and hue.
  • As text on white it measures APCA Lc 48.3; on black, Lc -53.7. 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 11.9 and 12.1 and 18.1 — no red cone.

Text on this colour

White text

2.46:1 — fails AA

Black text

8.54:1 — passes AA

Black text is the better of the two at8.54:1. That is enough for body text.

As text on white, it needs to change

#92713f 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

#c2a06d

protanopia

#a4a46d · ΔE00 11.9

deuteranopia

#abab6c · ΔE00 12.1

tritanopia

#b2b200 · ΔE00 18.1

Run a whole palette through all three

The twelve nearest named colours

Ranked by CIEDE2000 — perceptual distance, not hex arithmetic. The closest isEmpire Gold at ΔE00 0.573: below 1.0 — an ordinary observer cannot tell these apart, even side by side. What the numbers mean.

  • Empire GoldΔE00 0.573 · #c19f6e
  • Gilded PearΔE00 0.628 · #c09e6c
  • Curry SauceΔE00 1.205 · #be9e6f
  • Hazed NutsΔE00 1.268 · #c39e6d
  • Welcome HomeΔE00 1.284 · #c09c6a
  • TigerΔE00 1.316 · #be9c67
  • Mojave GoldΔE00 1.497 · #bf9c65
  • Bleached MapleΔE00 1.503 · #c7a06c
  • Mustard Seed BeigeΔE00 1.512 · #c5a574
  • Gould GoldΔE00 1.825 · #bc9d70
  • Edgy GreenΔE00 1.845 · #bf9a67
  • Buckskin PonyΔE00 1.907 · #c9a169

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