Bird Bath Blue

#cddfe7

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

#cddfe7

RGB

205, 223, 231

OKLCh

89.3% 0.022 226.2°

CIELAB (D50)

87.6, -5.0, -6.1

What is true of this colour, and of no other

  • 34 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 18.2; on black, Lc -85.4. 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 8.3 and 8.9 and 14.5 — no red cone.

Text on this colour

White text

1.37:1 — fails AA

Black text

15.30:1 — passes AA

Black text is the better of the two at15.30:1. That is enough for body text.

As text on white, it needs to change

#697980 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

#cddfe7

protanopia

#dddde7 · ΔE00 8.3

deuteranopia

#dadae7 · ΔE00 8.9

tritanopia

#d6d6ff · ΔE00 14.5

Run a whole palette through all three

The twelve nearest named colours

Ranked by CIEDE2000 — perceptual distance, not hex arithmetic. The closest isDuck’s Egg Blue at ΔE00 0.478: 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.