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Outdoor Silver

#bdbbc4
Notes

Outdoor Silver (#BDBBC4) 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 (253°, 7%, 75%) 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
#bdbbc4
RGB
rgb(189, 187, 196)
HSL
hsl(253, 7%, 75%)
HWB
hwb(253 73% 23%)
OKLCH
oklch(79.6% 0.013 296.3)
P3
color(display-p3 0.7398 0.7336 0.7657)
HSV
hsv(253, 5%, 77%)
LAB
lab(76.28% 2.39 -4.28)
LCH
lch(76.28% 4.90 299.15)
CMYK
cmyk(4%, 5%, 0%, 23%)

Etymology

Outdoor
adjective

English compound out + door — sharing root with German außerhalb. As a color modifier, outdoor implies a neutral-and-natural-and-weather-exposed quality, the neutral color of L-L-Bean-and-Patagonia outdoor-clothing weather-exposed-and-utilitarian outdoor-and-camping textile-finish surface. Sits at the neutral-and-traditional end of the grid, parallel to natural and weathered 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 = 0.013) — 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.

#bdbbc4
Original
#b9bcc4
Protanopia
#babcc4
Deuteranopia
#bcbcbe
Tritanopia
#bcbcbc
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
1.90:1
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
11.07:1

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
##BDBBC4
Display P3
Display P3
color(display-p3 0.7398 0.7336 0.7657)
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.

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