HueComb

Ephemeral Blue

#cbd4df

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

#cbd4df

RGB

203, 212, 223

OKLCh

86.6% 0.018 253.4°

CIELAB (D50)

84.5, -1.6, -6.6

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 27% 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 23.3; on black, Lc -79.9. 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.
  • tritanopia shifts it by ΔE00 10.8 — no blue cone.

Text on this colour

White text

1.50:1 — fails AA

Black text

14.02:1 — passes AA

Black text is the better of the two at14.02:1. That is enough for body text.

As text on white, it needs to change

#6f7881 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

#cbd4df

protanopia

#d3d3df · ΔE00 4.6

deuteranopia

#d1d1df · ΔE00 4.9

tritanopia

#d0d0f6 · ΔE00 10.8

Run a whole palette through all three

The twelve nearest named colours

Ranked by CIEDE2000 — perceptual distance, not hex arithmetic. The closest isLight Candela at ΔE00 0.983: below 1.0 — an ordinary observer cannot tell these apart, even side by side. What the numbers mean.

  • Light CandelaΔE00 0.983 · #c9d2df
  • Light Angora BlueΔE00 1.012 · #c9d4e1
  • Light StargateΔE00 1.045 · #c7d2dd
  • Memory LaneΔE00 1.056 · #c7d1db
  • QuarzoΔE00 1.061 · #c7d0da
  • Blue ReflectionΔE00 1.238 · #ccd7e1
  • Ozone BlueΔE00 1.351 · #c7d3e0
  • Colour BlindΔE00 1.371 · #c6d2de
  • Nefarious BlueΔE00 1.514 · #c5ced8
  • Steel MistΔE00 1.552 · #c6ceda
  • Twinkle BlueΔE00 1.592 · #d0d7df
  • Blue GossamerΔE00 1.656 · #cdd7df

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