Fierce Red

#cc0021

A red that is saturated. It is mid — the hardest range to put text on, either colour struggles.

Hex

#cc0021

RGB

204, 0, 33

OKLCh

53.3% 0.216 24.9°

CIELAB (D50)

43.5, 68.6, 45.5

What is true of this colour, and of no other

  • 19 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 sits exactly on the sRGB boundary: at this lightness and hue the gamut has nothing left, and a wider display would show a more colourful version of it.
  • As text on white it measures APCA Lc 76.5; on black, Lc -25.3. 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 39.2 and 45.5 and 50.5 — no red cone.

Text on this colour

White text

5.85:1 — passes AA

Black text

3.59:1 — large text only

White text is the better of the two at5.85:1. That is enough for body text.

The same colour, with one cone missing

As you see it

#cc0021

protanopia

#4a4a24 · ΔE00 39.2

deuteranopia

#757506 · ΔE00 45.5

tritanopia

#949400 · ΔE00 50.5

Run a whole palette through all three

The twelve nearest named colours

Ranked by CIEDE2000 — perceptual distance, not hex arithmetic. The closest isRare Rhubarb at ΔE00 0.243: below 1.0 — an ordinary observer cannot tell these apart, even side by side. What the numbers mean.

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