HueComb

Mercury

#ebebeb

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

#ebebeb

RGB

235, 235, 235

OKLCh

94.0% 0.000 89.9°

CIELAB (D50)

93.0, 0.0, 0.0

What is true of this colour, and of no other

  • 73 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 almost none of the chroma available here: this is a grey with a trace of hue rather than a colour.
  • As text on white it measures APCA Lc 9.4; on black, Lc -94.8. 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.
  • All three dichromacies see it as very nearly the same colour you do: its hue is not the part carrying its identity.

Text on this colour

White text

1.19:1 — fails AA

Black text

17.62:1 — passes AA

Black text is the better of the two at17.62:1. That is enough for body text.

As text on white, it needs to change

#777777 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

#ebebeb

protanopia

#ebebeb · ΔE00 0.0

deuteranopia

#ebebeb · ΔE00 0.0

tritanopia

#ebebeb · ΔE00 0.0

Run a whole palette through all three

The twelve nearest named colours

Ranked by CIEDE2000 — perceptual distance, not hex arithmetic. The closest isPlaster at ΔE00 0.214: below 1.0 — an ordinary observer cannot tell these apart, even side by side. What the numbers mean.

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