HueComb

Herring Silver

#c6c8cf

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

#c6c8cf

RGB

198, 200, 207

OKLCh

83.3% 0.010 273.3°

CIELAB (D50)

80.6, 0.3, -3.8

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 only 12% 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 29.5; on black, Lc -73.4. 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.
  • All three dichromacies see it as very nearly the same colour you do: its hue is not the part carrying its identity.

Text on this colour

White text

1.67:1 — fails AA

Black text

12.56:1 — passes AA

Black text is the better of the two at12.56:1. That is enough for body text.

As text on white, it needs to change

#75777d 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

#c6c8cf

protanopia

#c8c8cf · ΔE00 1.1

deuteranopia

#c7c7cf · ΔE00 1.2

tritanopia

#c7c7d5 · ΔE00 3.2

Run a whole palette through all three

The twelve nearest named colours

Ranked by CIEDE2000 — perceptual distance, not hex arithmetic. The closest isViola Ice Grey at ΔE00 0.465: below 1.0 — an ordinary observer cannot tell these apart, even side by side. What the numbers mean.

  • Viola Ice GreyΔE00 0.465 · #c6c8d0
  • Flat AluminiumΔE00 0.761 · #c3c6cd
  • Sharp GreyΔE00 0.762 · #c9cad1
  • Humid CaveΔE00 1.207 · #c9ccd2
  • Ghostly GreyΔE00 1.522 · #ccccd3
  • Dirty SnowΔE00 1.611 · #cdced5
  • Nimbus CloudΔE00 1.633 · #c8c8cc
  • Lilac HintΔE00 1.758 · #cacbd5
  • Paparazzi FlashΔE00 1.793 · #c6cbd1
  • Ash Tree BarkΔE00 1.84 · #cecfd6
  • Hyacinth IceΔE00 1.872 · #c8c8d2
  • Pico MetalΔE00 1.898 · #c2c3c7

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