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Aboriginal Silver

#c2c4ba
Notes

Aboriginal Silver (#C2C4BA) is a soft yellow 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 (72°, 8%, 75%) 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 indigo. For something softer, pull in its analogous neighbors on either side of the wheel.

HEX
#c2c4ba
RGB
rgb(194, 196, 186)
HSL
hsl(72, 8%, 75%)
HWB
hwb(72 73% 23%)
OKLCH
oklch(81.6% 0.014 115.9)
P3
color(display-p3 0.7622 0.7684 0.7329)
HSV
hsv(72, 5%, 77%)
LAB
lab(78.75% -2.50 4.77)
LCH
lch(78.75% 5.39 117.65)
CMYK
cmyk(1%, 0%, 5%, 23%)

Etymology

Aboriginal
adjective

Latin ab origine, from-the-beginning — adjectival suffix -al. As a color modifier, aboriginal implies a neutral-and-original-and-indigenous quality, the neutral color of Aboriginal-Australian dot-and-X-ray-painting traditional-and-original earth-and-mineral-pigment ceremonial-craft tradition. Sits at the neutral-and-traditional end of the grid, parallel to indigenous and native 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 = 0.014) — 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.

#c2c4ba
Original
#c6c3b9
Protanopia
#c5c3ba
Deuteranopia
#c3c3c1
Tritanopia
#c3c3c3
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
1.76:1
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
11.90:1

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
##C2C4BA
Display P3
Display P3
color(display-p3 0.7622 0.7684 0.7329)
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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