HueComb

Zen

#cfd9de

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

#cfd9de

RGB

207, 217, 222

OKLCh

87.9% 0.013 228.9°

CIELAB (D50)

86.0, -2.8, -3.7

What is true of this colour, and of no other

  • 33 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 17% 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 20.9; on black, Lc -82.5. 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.
  • deuteranopia and tritanopia shift it by ΔE00 5.4 and 13.0 — no green cone.

Text on this colour

White text

1.44:1 — fails AA

Black text

14.63:1 — passes AA

Black text is the better of the two at14.63:1. That is enough for body text.

As text on white, it needs to change

#6f787d 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

#cfd9de

protanopia

#d8d8de · ΔE00 5.0

deuteranopia

#d6d6de · ΔE00 5.4

tritanopia

#d4d4f8 · ΔE00 13.0

Run a whole palette through all three

The twelve nearest named colours

Ranked by CIEDE2000 — perceptual distance, not hex arithmetic. The closest isHinting Blue at ΔE00 0.721: below 1.0 — an ordinary observer cannot tell these apart, even side by side. What the numbers mean.

  • Hinting BlueΔE00 0.721 · #ced9dd
  • White BlueΔE00 0.78 · #cdd6db
  • Polar DriftΔE00 0.983 · #ccd5da
  • Mild BlueΔE00 1.037 · #cbd5db
  • Ocean DreamΔE00 1.067 · #d4dde2
  • Wisteria SnowΔE00 1.147 · #ced9dc
  • A Dime a DozenΔE00 1.327 · #d3dde4
  • Head in the CloudsΔE00 1.337 · #d1dde1
  • Pale CornflowerΔE00 1.34 · #ced9e1
  • Suave GreyΔE00 1.344 · #d1d8dd
  • Mystic PoolΔE00 1.355 · #d5dde2
  • Clear to SeeΔE00 1.355 · #cad6da

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