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Central Snowdrop

#bcb6bf
Notes

Central Snowdrop (#BCB6BF) 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 (280°, 7%, 73%) 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
#bcb6bf
RGB
rgb(188, 182, 191)
HSL
hsl(280, 7%, 73%)
HWB
hwb(280 71% 25%)
OKLCH
oklch(78.4% 0.014 314.7)
P3
color(display-p3 0.7331 0.7145 0.7463)
HSV
hsv(280, 5%, 75%)
LAB
lab(74.77% 3.78 -3.80)
LCH
lch(74.77% 5.36 314.86)
CMYK
cmyk(2%, 5%, 0%, 25%)

Etymology

Central
adjective

Latin centrālis, central — adjectival suffix -al. As a color modifier, central implies a neutral-and-central-and-balanced quality where the hue carries the visual register of Mid-Century-Modern and Bauhaus central-and-balanced-and-grounded foundational-design fundamental-element. Sits at the neutral-and-foundational end of the grid, parallel to core and grounded in usage.

Snowdrop
noun

Eurasian Galanthus nivalis — an Amaryllidaceae small bulb-perennial of late-winter-and-early-spring deciduous-forest-floor blooming, with iconic pale-cool-pale-gray-and-white pendulous bell-shaped flowers. Snowdrop color refers to a fully bloomed Galanthus nivalis in early-February snowfall: a pale cool gray with the velvet finish of fresh three-tepalled white-pendulous bell-flower against late-winter snow-covered forest-floor.

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 = 0.014) — 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.

#bcb6bf
Original
#b5b8bf
Protanopia
#b6b8bf
Deuteranopia
#bcb7b9
Tritanopia
#b8b8b8
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
1.98:1
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
10.58:1

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
##BCB6BF
Display P3
Display P3
color(display-p3 0.7331 0.7145 0.7463)
Inside sRGBOKLCH chroma 0.014

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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