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Deep Birman

#b5b1a7
Notes

Deep Birman (#B5B1A7) is a true amber 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 (43°, 9%, 68%) 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
#b5b1a7
RGB
rgb(181, 177, 167)
HSL
hsl(43, 9%, 68%)
HWB
hwb(43 65% 29%)
OKLCH
oklch(76.1% 0.015 88.7)
P3
color(display-p3 0.7071 0.6946 0.6588)
HSV
hsv(43, 8%, 71%)
LAB
lab(72.27% -0.38 5.61)
LCH
lch(72.27% 5.63 93.82)
CMYK
cmyk(0%, 2%, 8%, 29%)

Etymology

Deep
adjective

Old English dēop, profound, far down — sharing root with dive and dipper. In color shorthand, deep implies low lightness combined with high saturation: a deep red is darker than crimson but no less chromatic. Where dark describes value alone, deep implies that the hue still has presence at that low light level. Closer to rich than to somber.

Birman
noun

Burmese long-haired cat breed — the iconic pale-cream-and-pale-gray colorpoint breed with white gauntlet paws, derived from temple-cats of Burma and brought to France in 1919. Birman color refers to a fully grown seal-point Birman cat dorsal-coat in raking light: a pale cool gray with the silky finish of colorpoint cool-cream-and-seal-pigmented fur with characteristic Birman gauntlet-paw white-pattern.

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 = 0.015) — 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.

#b5b1a7
Original
#b4b1a6
Protanopia
#b5b2a7
Deuteranopia
#b8afae
Tritanopia
#b1b1b1
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
2.14:1
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
9.81:1

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
##B5B1A7
Display P3
Display P3
color(display-p3 0.7071 0.6946 0.6588)
Inside sRGBOKLCH chroma 0.015

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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