Helium
#eae5d8
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
#eae5d8
RGB
234, 229, 216
OKLCh
92.2% 0.018 89.4°
CIELAB (D50)
91.1, 0.1, 7.0
What is true of this colour, and of no other
- 158 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 19% 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 12.8; on black, Lc -91.1. 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.
- tritanopia shifts it by ΔE00 7.5 — no blue cone.
Text on this colour
White text
1.26:1 — fails AA
Black text
16.70:1 — passes AA
Black text is the better of the two at16.70:1. That is enough for body text.
As text on white, it needs to change
#7b766b 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
#eae5d8
protanopia
#e6e6d8 · ΔE00 2.6
deuteranopia
#e6e6d8 · ΔE00 2.7
tritanopia
#e7e7c7 · ΔE00 7.5
The twelve nearest named colours
Ranked by CIEDE2000 — perceptual distance, not hex arithmetic. The closest isElusive White at ΔE00 0.438: below 1.0 — an ordinary observer cannot tell these apart, even side by side. What the numbers mean.
- Elusive WhiteΔE00 0.438 · #e8e3d6
- White SilenceΔE00 0.454 · #ebe6d8
- Marzipan WhiteΔE00 0.511 · #ebe5d8
- Stocking WhiteΔE00 0.514 · #e9e5d8
- China WhiteΔE00 0.539 · #eae6d9
- Sugar QuillΔE00 0.566 · #ebe5d7
- Dry SandΔE00 0.597 · #eae4d6
- OstrichΔE00 0.699 · #e9e3d5
- Snowshoe HareΔE00 0.706 · #e7e3d6
- BerylloniteΔE00 0.725 · #e9e5d7
- Screech OwlΔE00 0.755 · #eae4d8
- Crystal HazeΔE00 0.763 · #e7e2d6
11 of these have no page of their own: pages exist for the 4,961 colours the dataset marks as good names.