HueComb

Polar Expedition

#c9e7e3

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

#c9e7e3

RGB

201, 231, 227

OKLCh

90.5% 0.032 186.9°

CIELAB (D50)

89.4, -10.8, -1.5

What is true of this colour, and of no other

  • 25 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 15.4; on black, Lc -88.4. 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.
  • protanopia and deuteranopia and tritanopia shift it by ΔE00 11.8 and 12.8 and 20.1 — no red cone.

Text on this colour

White text

1.31:1 — fails AA

Black text

16.02:1 — passes AA

Black text is the better of the two at16.02:1. That is enough for body text.

As text on white, it needs to change

#617c79 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

#c9e7e3

protanopia

#e4e4e3 · ΔE00 11.8

deuteranopia

#dfdfe4 · ΔE00 12.8

tritanopia

#d9d9ff · ΔE00 20.1

Run a whole palette through all three

The twelve nearest named colours

Ranked by CIEDE2000 — perceptual distance, not hex arithmetic. The closest isJagged Ice at ΔE00 0.505: below 1.0 — an ordinary observer cannot tell these apart, even side by side. What the numbers mean.

  • Jagged IceΔE00 0.505 · #cae7e2
  • Frosty White BlueΔE00 0.693 · #cce9e4
  • Source BlueΔE00 0.859 · #cdeae5
  • Swan LakeΔE00 0.87 · #c5e5e2
  • Moonlight JadeΔE00 0.972 · #c7e5df
  • Tahitian SkyΔE00 1.056 · #c9e9e7
  • SpaΔE00 1.162 · #ceece7
  • Ionic SkyΔE00 1.4 · #d0ede9
  • Icy BlueΔE00 1.503 · #ccedea
  • Spearmint LeafΔE00 1.523 · #cbece6
  • TidewaterΔE00 1.636 · #c2e3dd
  • Windwood SpringΔE00 1.648 · #c2e5e0

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