HueComb

Placebo Yellow

#fcfbeb

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

#fcfbeb

RGB

252, 251, 235

OKLCh

98.5% 0.021 103.9°

CIELAB (D50)

98.4, -1.7, 7.8

What is true of this colour, and of no other

  • 29 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 43% of the chroma sRGB can show at this lightness and hue.
  • As text on white it measures APCA Lc 0.0; on black, Lc -104.6. 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

1.04:1 — fails AA

Black text

20.14:1 — passes AA

Black text is the better of the two at20.14:1. That is enough for body text.

As text on white, it needs to change

#787769 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

#fcfbeb

protanopia

#fbfbeb · ΔE00 0.5

deuteranopia

#fbfbeb · ΔE00 0.5

tritanopia

#fbfbe8 · ΔE00 1.5

Run a whole palette through all three

The twelve nearest named colours

Ranked by CIEDE2000 — perceptual distance, not hex arithmetic. The closest isStately White at ΔE00 0.54: 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.