HueComb

Swan Lake

#c5e5e2

A cyan that is nearly neutral — the hue shows only against a true grey. It is very light — it works as a page background, not as text.

Hex

#c5e5e2

RGB

197, 229, 226

OKLCh

89.8% 0.034 189.7°

CIELAB (D50)

88.5, -11.3, -2.3

What is true of this colour, and of no other

  • 24 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 22% 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 16.7; on black, Lc -87.0. 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 12.4 and 13.6 and 20.6 — no red cone.

Text on this colour

White text

1.34:1 — fails AA

Black text

15.68:1 — passes AA

Black text is the better of the two at15.68:1. That is enough for body text.

As text on white, it needs to change

#5f7c7a 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

#c5e5e2

protanopia

#e2e2e2 · ΔE00 12.4

deuteranopia

#dcdce3 · ΔE00 13.6

tritanopia

#d6d6ff · ΔE00 20.6

Run a whole palette through all three

The twelve nearest named colours

Ranked by CIEDE2000 — perceptual distance, not hex arithmetic. The closest isPolar Expedition at ΔE00 0.87: 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.