HueComb

Gin Tonic

#ecebe5

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

#ecebe5

RGB

236, 235, 229

OKLCh

93.9% 0.008 98.9°

CIELAB (D50)

93.0, -0.4, 3.0

What is true of this colour, and of no other

  • 119 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 7% 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 9.5; on black, Lc -94.7. 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

17.58:1 — passes AA

Black text is the better of the two at17.58:1. That is enough for body text.

As text on white, it needs to change

#787772 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

#ecebe5

protanopia

#ebebe5 · ΔE00 0.5

deuteranopia

#ebebe5 · ΔE00 0.6

tritanopia

#ebebe2 · ΔE00 1.8

Run a whole palette through all three

The twelve nearest named colours

Ranked by CIEDE2000 — perceptual distance, not hex arithmetic. The closest isCommercial White at ΔE00 0.213: below 1.0 — an ordinary observer cannot tell these apart, even side by side. What the numbers mean.

  • Commercial WhiteΔE00 0.213 · #edece6
  • Melting IciclesΔE00 0.456 · #ecebe4
  • BlancoΔE00 0.506 · #ebeae5
  • Whipped Coconut CreamΔE00 0.519 · #edece7
  • Signal WhiteΔE00 0.545 · #ecece6
  • SaltΔE00 0.777 · #efede6
  • White MinkΔE00 0.802 · #efeee9
  • Thousand ShellsΔE00 0.804 · #e9e8e1
  • Metropolitan WhiteΔE00 0.81 · #eeece7
  • White ModerneΔE00 0.936 · #ebeae2
  • Silver DustΔE00 0.99 · #e8e7e0
  • White SailΔE00 1.004 · #ebebe7

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