HueComb

Doctor

#f9f9f9

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

#f9f9f9

RGB

249, 249, 249

OKLCh

98.2% 0.000 89.9°

CIELAB (D50)

97.9, 0.0, 0.0

What is true of this colour, and of no other

  • 36 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 0.0; on black, Lc -103.9. 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

1.05:1 — fails AA

Black text

19.95:1 — passes AA

Black text is the better of the two at19.95:1. 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

#f9f9f9

protanopia

#f9f9f9 · ΔE00 0.0

deuteranopia

#f9f9f9 · ΔE00 0.0

tritanopia

#f9f9f9 · 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 isDr. White at ΔE00 0.202: below 1.0 — an ordinary observer cannot tell these apart, even side by side. What the numbers mean.

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