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Clear Albite

#bab1ae
Notes

Clear Albite (#BAB1AE) is a soft 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 (15°, 8%, 71%) places it in the muted band at a light lightness. It works as a background wash, large-area fill, or soft illustration tone. Add a darker ink of the same hue when you need type over it. For a confident two-color system, pair it with its complementary cyan. For something softer, pull in its analogous neighbors on either side of the wheel.

HEX
#bab1ae
RGB
rgb(186, 177, 174)
HSL
hsl(15, 8%, 71%)
HWB
hwb(15 68% 27%)
OKLCH
oklch(76.7% 0.011 39.4)
P3
color(display-p3 0.7233 0.6953 0.6841)
HSV
hsv(15, 6%, 73%)
LAB
lab(72.85% 2.66 2.68)
LCH
lch(72.85% 3.77 45.14)
CMYK
cmyk(0%, 5%, 6%, 27%)

Etymology

Clear
adjective

From the Latin clarus, bright, distinct — used as a color modifier since the medieval period for hues without haze or mixing. Clear blue sky, clear green water: the implication is moderate saturation combined with optical clarity. Sits at the crisp-bucket center alongside clean and true.

Albite
noun

NaAlSi₃O₈ sodium-feldspar mineral — the principal sodium-rich endmember of the plagioclase feldspar group, mined principally at Stark, Maine and Crystal Peak, Colorado. Albite color refers to a freshly cleaved Crystal-Peak albite cleavelandite face: a pale cool gray with the glassy finish of triclinic-system sodium-aluminum-silicate with the characteristic albite Carlsbad-twinning striated cleavage-planes.

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 = 0.011) — 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.

#bab1ae
Original
#b3b2ae
Protanopia
#b5b3ae
Deuteranopia
#bdb0b0
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
##BAB1AE
Display P3
Display P3
color(display-p3 0.7233 0.6953 0.6841)
Inside sRGBOKLCH chroma 0.011

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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