Getting Wet

#c3dae3

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

#c3dae3

RGB

195, 218, 227

OKLCh

87.4% 0.028 223.3°

CIELAB (D50)

85.5, -6.6, -7.2

What is true of this colour, and of no other

  • 20 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 32% 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 21.6; on black, Lc -81.8. 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 10.1 and 10.9 and 16.0 — no red cone.

Text on this colour

White text

1.45:1 — fails AA

Black text

14.46:1 — passes AA

Black text is the better of the two at14.46:1. That is enough for body text.

As text on white, it needs to change

#657a82 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

#c3dae3

protanopia

#d8d8e3 · ΔE00 10.1

deuteranopia

#d4d4e3 · ΔE00 10.9

tritanopia

#cfcfff · ΔE00 16.0

Run a whole palette through all three

The twelve nearest named colours

Ranked by CIEDE2000 — perceptual distance, not hex arithmetic. The closest isFalling Tears at ΔE00 0.92: below 1.0 — an ordinary observer cannot tell these apart, even side by side. 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.