Cold Putty
Cold Putty (#86828C) is a balanced neutral with a mono character. It's a grayscale value, at home in typography, dividers, and the structural layer beneath stronger colors. Its HSL profile (264°, 4%, 53%) places it in the muted band at a mid lightness. It works well as secondary text, borders, and placeholder states. A reliable middle gray that reads cleanly in either light or dark contexts. Pair it with almost any saturated accent. It's built to sit underneath or behind stronger colors without fighting them.
Etymology
Old English ceald, of low temperature — used as a color modifier since the medieval period for hues with a slight blue or blue-green shift, even within otherwise neutral grays. Cold gray, cold white: the optical impression of a low-temperature reflective surface. Sits in the neutral-and-cool corner alongside icy.
A traditional glazing paste of calcium carbonate (chalk) and linseed oil — pressed into window-glass channels to seal panes since the eighteenth century. The color refers to fresh putty straight from the tin: a soft, slightly muted off-white gray with the slightly oily matte finish of unset paste. Lighter than stone, warmer than cement, with the architectural-trade weight of a material now largely replaced by silicone.
Closest matches
The nearest named color in three reference sources, ranked by perceptual distance (ΔE76 in CIELAB). ΔE < 1 is imperceptible to most viewers; ΔE > 10 is clearly different. When two sources point to the same hex they’re merged into one tile; click any to open that color’s page.
Variations
Click any swatch to exploreHarmonies
Accessibility
How this color appears to viewers with the four major color-vision-deficiency types. Computed via the Machado (2009) physiologically-based model. If a tile matches the original, the color reads the same to that viewer.
The color used as foreground text against pure white and pure black, with the contrast ratio and WCAG 2.1 grade. Aim for AA (4.5:1) for body text and AA Large (3:1) for 18 pt+ headlines; AAA (7:1) is the gold standard for long-form reading surfaces.
Wide gamut
The CSS Color 4 wide-gamut form of this color. Both swatches render the same color on every display — the P3 form only diverges from sRGB when a designer pushes channels outside sRGB's reach.
This color sits well within the sRGB cube. P3 and sRGB share the gray axis and most desaturated tones, so a P3 display renders this identically to an sRGB display.