colors
Back to gallery

Aboriginal Snowfall

#b8b2aa
Notes

Aboriginal Snowfall (#B8B2AA) 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 (34°, 9%, 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 azure. For something softer, pull in its analogous neighbors on either side of the wheel.

HEX
#b8b2aa
RGB
rgb(184, 178, 170)
HSL
hsl(34, 9%, 69%)
HWB
hwb(34 67% 28%)
OKLCH
oklch(76.6% 0.013 75.3)
P3
color(display-p3 0.7175 0.6988 0.6700)
HSV
hsv(34, 8%, 72%)
LAB
lab(72.85% 0.70 4.84)
LCH
lch(72.85% 4.89 81.78)
CMYK
cmyk(0%, 3%, 8%, 28%)

Etymology

Aboriginal
adjective

Latin ab origine, from-the-beginning — adjectival suffix -al. As a color modifier, aboriginal implies a neutral-and-original-and-indigenous quality, the neutral color of Aboriginal-Australian dot-and-X-ray-painting traditional-and-original earth-and-mineral-pigment ceremonial-craft tradition. Sits at the neutral-and-traditional end of the grid, parallel to indigenous and native in usage.

Snowfall
noun

Old English snāw-feall, fall of snow — the iconic pale-cool-pale-white atmospheric-precipitation pattern of cold-front-and-cyclonic-low-pressure winter weather. Snowfall color refers to a freshly fallen winter snowfall on a Vermont-Stowe mountainside in mid-January: a pale cool gray with the optical complexity of dendritic-snowflake crystal-structure scattering against the dark-conifer-and-spruce-forest substrate.

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 = 0.013) — 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.

#b8b2aa
Original
#b5b2aa
Protanopia
#b6b3aa
Deuteranopia
#bbb0b0
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
9.99:1

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
##B8B2AA
Display P3
Display P3
color(display-p3 0.7175 0.6988 0.6700)
Inside sRGBOKLCH chroma 0.013

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.

Related Colors

Canvas