Thunder & Lightning

#f9f5db

A yellow 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

#f9f5db

RGB

249, 245, 219

OKLCh

96.6% 0.034 99.8°

CIELAB (D50)

96.3, -1.8, 13.1

What is true of this colour, and of no other

  • 74 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 48% of the chroma sRGB can show at this lightness and hue.
  • As text on white it measures APCA Lc 0.0; on black, Lc -100.7. 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.
  • tritanopia shifts it by ΔE00 5.1 — no blue cone.

Text on this colour

White text

1.10:1 — fails AA

Black text

19.11:1 — passes AA

Black text is the better of the two at19.11:1. That is enough for body text.

As text on white, it needs to change

#7b7760 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

#f9f5db

protanopia

#f5f5db · ΔE00 1.8

deuteranopia

#f6f6db · ΔE00 1.9

tritanopia

#f7f7cc · ΔE00 5.1

Run a whole palette through all three

The twelve nearest named colours

Ranked by CIEDE2000 — perceptual distance, not hex arithmetic. The closest isSkullfire at ΔE00 0.321: below 1.0 — an ordinary observer cannot tell these apart, even side by side. What the numbers mean.

  • SkullfireΔE00 0.321 · #f9f5da
  • Warm SunΔE00 0.37 · #faf6db
  • Pineapple SorbetΔE00 0.526 · #f7f4da
  • Weathered PlasticΔE00 0.55 · #f9f4d9
  • White HydrangeaΔE00 0.557 · #f9f6dd
  • Limestone QuarryΔE00 0.613 · #f9f6db
  • TranscendenceΔE00 0.681 · #f8f4d8
  • Line DriedΔE00 0.706 · #f8f3da
  • Lemon SplashΔE00 0.772 · #f9f6de
  • Breezy BeigeΔE00 0.791 · #f7f2d7
  • Best of SummerΔE00 0.828 · #f7f2d9
  • Campanelle NoodleΔE00 0.832 · #fcf7db

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