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Friendly Foam

#a9b6b2
Notes

Friendly Foam (#A9B6B2) is a true teal with a cool character. It leans cool, sitting on the blue, green, and violet side of the wheel. Quiet and dependable, a fit for product UI and data visualization. Its HSL profile (162°, 8%, 69%) places it in the muted band at a mid lightness. It works across type, buttons, and borders, saturated enough to feel deliberate but balanced enough to not fight the rest of the palette. For a confident two-color system, pair it with its complementary red. For something softer, pull in its analogous neighbors on either side of the wheel.

HEX
#a9b6b2
RGB
rgb(169, 182, 178)
HSL
hsl(162, 8%, 69%)
HWB
hwb(162 66% 29%)
OKLCH
oklch(76.5% 0.016 175.6)
P3
color(display-p3 0.6722 0.7121 0.6986)
HSV
hsv(162, 7%, 71%)
LAB
lab(72.96% -5.28 0.48)
LCH
lch(72.96% 5.30 174.79)
CMYK
cmyk(7%, 0%, 2%, 29%)

Etymology

Friendly
adjective

Old English frēondlīc, friend-like — adjectival suffix -ly. As a color modifier, friendly implies a neutral-and-welcoming-and-approachable quality, the neutral color of American-Country-and-English-Cottage friendly-and-welcoming-hosting interior-decoration-and-textile coordinated-color tone. Sits at the neutral-and-friendly end of the grid, parallel to amiable and cordial in usage.

Foam
noun

A suspension of gas bubbles in a liquid — ocean foam, beer head, the meringue of whipped egg whites. The color foam refers to fresh ocean spray on wet sand: a soft, very pale slightly cool off-white with the optical brightness of millimeter-scale bubble dispersion. Lighter than mist.

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 explore

Harmonies

Accessibility

Color-vision simulation

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.

#a9b6b2
Original
#b5b4b2
Protanopia
#b2b2b2
Deuteranopia
#a6b6b5
Tritanopia
#b3b3b3
Achromatopsia
WCAG contrast

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.

The quick brown foxSample body text at normal size. The wcag minimum for body contrast is 4.5:1 (AA) or 7:1 (AAA).
Failon White
2.10:1
The quick brown foxSample body text at normal size. The wcag minimum for body contrast is 4.5:1 (AA) or 7:1 (AAA).
AAAon Black
10.02:1

Wide gamut

Display P3 representation

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.

sRGB hex
sRGB hex
##A9B6B2
Display P3
Display P3
color(display-p3 0.6722 0.7121 0.6986)
Inside sRGBOKLCH chroma 0.016

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.

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