Breath of Fresh Air

#c7dbe4

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

#c7dbe4

RGB

199, 219, 228

OKLCh

87.9% 0.025 226.5°

CIELAB (D50)

86.1, -5.6, -6.8

What is true of this colour, and of no other

  • 36 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 20.7; on black, Lc -82.7. 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 9.1 and 9.8 and 15.2 — no red cone.

Text on this colour

White text

1.43:1 — fails AA

Black text

14.68:1 — passes AA

Black text is the better of the two at14.68:1. That is enough for body text.

As text on white, it needs to change

#677a82 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

#c7dbe4

protanopia

#d9d9e4 · ΔE00 9.1

deuteranopia

#d5d5e4 · ΔE00 9.8

tritanopia

#d1d1ff · ΔE00 15.2

Run a whole palette through all three

The twelve nearest named colours

Ranked by CIEDE2000 — perceptual distance, not hex arithmetic. The closest isBlue Pearl at ΔE00 0.627: 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.