Baker’s Dozen

#ceb997

An orange that is nearly neutral — the hue shows only against a true grey. It is light — black text sits on it comfortably, white text does not.

Hex

#ceb997

RGB

206, 185, 151

OKLCh

79.5% 0.052 79.7°

CIELAB (D50)

76.3, 3.9, 20.2

What is true of this colour, and of no other

  • 35 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 31% 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 36.4; on black, Lc -66.1. 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 9.3 and 9.4 and 20.3 — no red cone.

Text on this colour

White text

1.91:1 — fails AA

Black text

11.01:1 — passes AA

Black text is the better of the two at11.01:1. That is enough for body text.

As text on white, it needs to change

#877454 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

#ceb997

protanopia

#bcbc97 · ΔE00 9.3

deuteranopia

#bfbf96 · ΔE00 9.4

tritanopia

#c4c400 · ΔE00 20.3

Run a whole palette through all three

The twelve nearest named colours

Ranked by CIEDE2000 — perceptual distance, not hex arithmetic. The closest isReal Simple at ΔE00 0.517: below 1.0 — an ordinary observer cannot tell these apart, even side by side. What the numbers mean.

  • Real SimpleΔE00 0.517 · #ccb896
  • October HarvestΔE00 0.69 · #d1bb98
  • Spiced VinegarΔE00 0.79 · #cdba99
  • Bird’s NestΔE00 0.804 · #cfbb9b
  • CommunityΔE00 0.808 · #d0b997
  • High NoonΔE00 0.891 · #cfb999
  • Curious CollectionΔE00 0.958 · #d2bb98
  • Pony TailΔE00 1.045 · #d2bc9b
  • HayloftΔE00 1.191 · #cdba96
  • Polished MarbleΔE00 1.199 · #d0bc9d
  • WildwoodΔE00 1.219 · #cdb99b
  • Palmetto BluffΔE00 1.226 · #ceb993

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