Seashell

#fff5ee

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

#fff5ee

RGB

255, 245, 238

OKLCh

97.6% 0.014 57.6°

CIELAB (D50)

97.2, 2.6, 4.6

What is true of this colour, and of no other

  • 10 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 sits exactly on the sRGB boundary: at this lightness and hue the gamut has nothing left, and a wider display would show a more colourful version of it.
  • As text on white it measures APCA Lc 0.0; on black, Lc -102.4. 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 5.2 and 5.6 and 15.0 — no red cone.

Text on this colour

White text

1.07:1 — fails AA

Black text

19.55:1 — passes AA

Black text is the better of the two at19.55:1. That is enough for body text.

As text on white, it needs to change

#7e756f 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

#fff5ee

protanopia

#f6f6ee · ΔE00 5.2

deuteranopia

#f8f8ee · ΔE00 5.6

tritanopia

#fafaca · ΔE00 15.0

Run a whole palette through all three

The twelve nearest named colours

Ranked by CIEDE2000 — perceptual distance, not hex arithmetic. The closest isAmbrosia Ivory at ΔE00 0.924: 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.