Shaker Cowrie
Shaker Cowrie (#B9B3BD) 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 (276°, 7%, 72%) 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.
Etymology
English Shaker, United-Society-of-Believers-in-Christ's-Second-Appearing — adjectival usage of Shaker. As a color modifier, shaker implies a neutral-and-plain-and-stripped-down quality, the neutral color of Shaker-furniture-and-craft anti-ornamental-and-functional hand-built-and-precise-craft surface-finish. Sits at the neutral-and-stripped-down end of the grid, parallel to quakerly and plain in usage.
Indian-Ocean Monetaria moneta (money cowrie) — a Cypraeidae marine-snail-shell with characteristic pale-cream-and-pale-gray glossy shell-surface, used as currency in pre-modern Indian-Ocean-and-South-Pacific trade. Cowrie color refers to a freshly polished Monetaria moneta shell-surface in raking light: a pale cool gray with the glossy finish of aragonite-nacre layered structurally-colored cowrie-shell-mantle deposition.
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 exploreHarmonies
Accessibility
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.
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.
Wide gamut
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.
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.