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Indigenous Silver

#b8b4b2
Notes

Indigenous Silver (#B8B4B2) is a pale 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 (20°, 4%, 71%) places it in the muted band at a light lightness. It works as a soft page background, card surface, or low-key divider. Avoid it for body text against white. Pair it with almost any saturated accent. It's built to sit underneath or behind stronger colors without fighting them.

HEX
#b8b4b2
RGB
rgb(184, 180, 178)
HSL
hsl(20, 4%, 71%)
HWB
hwb(20 70% 28%)
OKLCH
oklch(77.3% 0.005 48.7)
P3
color(display-p3 0.7188 0.7064 0.6990)
HSV
hsv(20, 3%, 72%)
LAB
lab(73.58% 1.05 1.52)
LCH
lch(73.58% 1.84 55.44)
CMYK
cmyk(0%, 2%, 3%, 28%)

Etymology

Indigenous
adjective

Latin indigena, native-born — adjectival suffix -ous. As a color modifier, indigenous implies a neutral-and-native-and-traditional quality, the neutral color of Indigenous-and-First-Nations hand-built-and-tradition-rooted ceremonial-craft pottery-and-textile-and-totem surface-finish. Sits at the neutral-and-traditional end of the grid, parallel to native and aboriginal in usage.

Silver
noun

Element Ag, atomic number 47 — the most reflective metal in the visible spectrum, used since antiquity for coinage, mirrors, and tableware. The color refers to freshly polished sterling silver: a clean, slightly cool bright silver with the high specular shine of a polished noble metal. Cooler than sterling, warmer than platinum.

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 = 0.005) — 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.

#b8b4b2
Original
#b5b4b2
Protanopia
#b6b5b2
Deuteranopia
#b9b3b3
Tritanopia
#b5b5b5
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
2.06:1
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
10.21:1

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
##B8B4B2
Display P3
Display P3
color(display-p3 0.7188 0.7064 0.6990)
Inside sRGBOKLCH chroma 0.005

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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