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Quakerly Ash

#afa5a0
Notes

Quakerly Ash (#AFA5A0) is a true orange with a warm character. It leans warm, pulling light toward red, orange, and yellow. Naturally inviting, it suits editorial and hospitality contexts. Its HSL profile (20°, 9%, 66%) 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 azure. For something softer, pull in its analogous neighbors on either side of the wheel.

HEX
#afa5a0
RGB
rgb(175, 165, 160)
HSL
hsl(20, 9%, 66%)
HWB
hwb(20 63% 31%)
OKLCH
oklch(72.9% 0.014 48.5)
P3
color(display-p3 0.6795 0.6484 0.6300)
HSV
hsv(20, 9%, 69%)
LAB
lab(68.43% 2.71 3.88)
LCH
lch(68.43% 4.73 55.03)
CMYK
cmyk(0%, 6%, 9%, 31%)

Etymology

Quakerly
adjective

English Quaker, Religious-Society-of-Friends — adjectival suffix -ly. As a color modifier, quakerly implies a neutral-and-plain-and-stripped-down quality, the neutral color of Society-of-Friends-Meeting-House anti-ornamental-and-plain interior-and-textile traditional-style surface-finish. Sits at the neutral-and-stripped-down end of the grid, parallel to plain and simple in usage.

Ash
noun

The mineral residue left after wood or coal completely combusts — calcium, potassium, and silicate that remain after carbon has gasified. Ash as a color refers to the soft pale gray of cooled hardwood ash: a soft, slightly muted gray with the matte finish of micron-scale mineral particulate. Cooler than smoke, warmer than dust, with the agricultural weight of a substance that fertilizes fields and clarifies soap-making lye.

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

This color has effectively no chroma (OKLCH C = 0.014) — it’s on the grayscale axis. Hue rotations don’t change a grayscale color, so complementary, analogous, triadic, and split-complementary all reduce to the same value. They aren’t shown because four identical tiles would be misleading.

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.

#afa5a0
Original
#a8a6a0
Protanopia
#aaa8a0
Deuteranopia
#b2a3a4
Tritanopia
#a7a7a7
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
2.41:1
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
8.71:1

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
##AFA5A0
Display P3
Display P3
color(display-p3 0.6795 0.6484 0.6300)
Inside sRGBOKLCH chroma 0.014

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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