Ice Desert

#d1dce8

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

#d1dce8

RGB

209, 220, 232

OKLCh

89.0% 0.020 250.4°

CIELAB (D50)

87.2, -2.1, -7.2

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 36% 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 18.9; on black, Lc -84.6. 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 5.5 and 5.8 and 11.2 — no red cone.

Text on this colour

White text

1.39:1 — fails AA

Black text

15.11:1 — passes AA

Black text is the better of the two at15.11:1. That is enough for body text.

As text on white, it needs to change

#6e7883 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

#d1dce8

protanopia

#dbdbe8 · ΔE00 5.5

deuteranopia

#d9d9e8 · ΔE00 5.8

tritanopia

#d7d7ff · ΔE00 11.2

Run a whole palette through all three

The twelve nearest named colours

Ranked by CIEDE2000 — perceptual distance, not hex arithmetic. The closest isBlue Silk at ΔE00 0.422: below 1.0 — an ordinary observer cannot tell these apart, even side by side. What the numbers mean.

  • Blue SilkΔE00 0.422 · #d0dce8
  • Shattered SkyΔE00 0.838 · #d0dde9
  • Nordic BreezeΔE00 0.882 · #d3dde7
  • Minified Ballerina BlueΔE00 0.929 · #d3dfea
  • Burj Khalifa FountainΔE00 0.974 · #d4dee8
  • Dripping IceΔE00 1.135 · #d2dfed
  • Haunting HueΔE00 1.154 · #d3e0ec
  • Great Blue HeronΔE00 1.254 · #d5e0ee
  • Arctic AirΔE00 1.292 · #cbd8e5
  • Beyond the WallΔE00 1.301 · #d7e0eb
  • Sueded GreyΔE00 1.314 · #d3dbe7
  • Brush BlueΔE00 1.321 · #d4e1ed

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