HueComb

Walkie Chalkie

#faf5fa

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

#faf5fa

RGB

250, 245, 250

OKLCh

97.5% 0.008 325.6°

CIELAB (D50)

97.0, 2.4, -1.8

What is true of this colour, and of no other

  • 4 other named colours sit within ΔE00 2 of it.
  • It uses only 39% 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 0.0; on black, Lc -102.2. 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 9.4 — no blue cone.

Text on this colour

White text

1.08:1 — fails AA

Black text

19.51:1 — passes AA

Black text is the better of the two at19.51:1. That is enough for body text.

As text on white, it needs to change

#7a757a 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

#faf5fa

protanopia

#f6f6fa · ΔE00 2.5

deuteranopia

#f6f6fa · ΔE00 2.7

tritanopia

#f7f7eb · ΔE00 9.4

Run a whole palette through all three

The twelve nearest named colours

Ranked by CIEDE2000 — perceptual distance, not hex arithmetic. The closest isAbalone at ΔE00 1.027: between 1 and 2 — a trained eye spots it when the two touch; nobody spots it across a room. 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.