Dwindling Dandelion

#f9e9d6

An orange that is nearly neutral — the hue shows only against a true grey. It is very light — it works as a page background, not as text.

Hex

#f9e9d6

RGB

249, 233, 214

OKLCh

94.2% 0.031 72.2°

CIELAB (D50)

93.3, 3.3, 11.3

What is true of this colour, and of no other

  • 66 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 69% of the chroma sRGB can show at this lightness and hue.
  • As text on white it measures APCA Lc 9.2; on black, Lc -95.0. 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 8.0 and 8.4 and 18.4 — no red cone.

Text on this colour

White text

1.19:1 — fails AA

Black text

17.65:1 — passes AA

Black text is the better of the two at17.65:1. That is enough for body text.

As text on white, it needs to change

#837564 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

#f9e9d6

protanopia

#ebebd6 · ΔE00 8.0

deuteranopia

#eeeed6 · ΔE00 8.4

tritanopia

#f1f18f · ΔE00 18.4

Run a whole palette through all three

The twelve nearest named colours

Ranked by CIEDE2000 — perceptual distance, not hex arithmetic. The closest isPignoli at ΔE00 0.401: 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.