Airy
#dae6e9
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
#dae6e9
RGB
218, 230, 233
OKLCh
91.7% 0.013 214.4°
CIELAB (D50)
90.4, -3.7, -2.9
What is true of this colour, and of no other
- 40 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 20% 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 13.6; on black, Lc -90.2. 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 5.8 and 6.2 and 12.9 — no red cone.
Text on this colour
White text
1.27:1 — fails AA
Black text
16.48:1 — passes AA
Black text is the better of the two at16.48:1. That is enough for body text.
As text on white, it needs to change
#6e797b is the nearest colour of the same hue that passes AA on white, at 4.50:1. Only the lightness moved.
The same colour, with one cone missing
As you see it
#dae6e9
protanopia
#e5e5e9 · ΔE00 5.8
deuteranopia
#e3e3e9 · ΔE00 6.2
tritanopia
#e0e0ff · ΔE00 12.9
The twelve nearest named colours
Ranked by CIEDE2000 — perceptual distance, not hex arithmetic. The closest isInuit Blue at ΔE00 0.441: below 1.0 — an ordinary observer cannot tell these apart, even side by side. What the numbers mean.
- Inuit BlueΔE00 0.441 · #d8e4e7
- Baby’s BreathΔE00 0.641 · #d8e4e8
- Smoke and MirrorsΔE00 0.696 · #d9e6e8
- Soft Blue WhiteΔE00 0.709 · #dae7e9
- EraΔE00 0.831 · #d7e3e5
- BeachcomberΔE00 0.841 · #d8e3e5
- Bare MintimumΔE00 0.892 · #d6e3e7
- GlassineΔE00 0.931 · #d7e2e5
- Sidewalk Chalk BlueΔE00 1.006 · #dbe9ed
- April WindsΔE00 1.025 · #d5e2e5
- Bit of BlueΔE00 1.043 · #d9e3e5
- Subtle BlueΔE00 1.058 · #d9e4e5
9 of these have no page of their own: pages exist for the 4,961 colours the dataset marks as good names.