White Smoke#F5F5F5, a faint gray

White Smoke in RGB, HSL, OKLCH & more

Ready to ship: every line pastes straight into your codebase, and the whole file copies at once.

ART is Rhapsody's perceptual model. How ART works

What kind of neutral is White Smoke?

Every color has a place in the standard vocabulary. This is White Smoke's, measured rather than asserted.

White Smoke is achromatic. That means no hue at all. Its red, green, and blue channels are equal, so there's no direction for a hue to point in. Only lightness. Munsell writes that as value 9.7 with chroma 0 (chroma is how vivid a color is). ISCC-NBS, the naming standard built on top of Munsell, files it under white.

Because there's no hue to reproduce, a neutral is the one kind of color that survives almost any conversion unchanged. No gamut (the range of colors a screen or a press can actually show) can clip a hue that isn't there.

Munsell coordinates and block from the ISCC-NBS system, computed by Rhapsody's own renotation inversion.

Shades of White Smoke, lighter and darker

For hover states, washed backgrounds, and dark surfaces that still read as #F5F5F5. 13 steps, spaced evenly by eye, with the color itself sitting at its natural depth, white-smoke-50.

Tints (light surfaces; dark text passes on every one)

Midtones (the color at full strength, for brand & accent work)

Shades (dark surfaces; light text passes on every one)

Is White Smoke accessible? Contrast with other neutrals

Strong contrast makes your work readable by everyone, and meets the WCAG standard accessibility law points at. AA is the floor; AAA is the tier worth aiming for in body text. Black text on #F5F5F5 clears WCAG AAA. Every strip below is one surface, and the marks are the steps that reach AAA on it.

Rows are text, columns are background · 60 of 210 pairings reach WCAG 2.2 AAA, shown here.

White Smoke in CMYK: one value for files, one per press

None of these presses can print this color. It's lighter than the paper, and ink only darkens a sheet, so the brightest thing on a printed page is the page itself. So what do you do? Pick a brighter stock, or let the paper be your lightest tone and build the contrast somewhere else.

In CMYK, #F5F5F5 is C0 · M0 · Y0 · K3.9. That is the value design tools and file formats use when no press is involved.

On press (what each standard prints)

Press values computed through the ICC characterization data each standard proofs against. Each CMYK above is the closest that standard can get. None of them reaches the color. It sits above the paper's own white.

Colors similar to White Smoke

Here are other colors similar to White Smoke along with accessible text pairings and whether or not they're print-safe. Explore Grayscale

Colors that go with White Smoke

Anything. A pure neutral has no complement and nothing sits across the wheel from it, so every color is safe next to #F5F5F5. If you want ready-made signals, its system ships four:

Use them as they are for status and interface work, or bring any brand color you already have; the gray will hold it.

Take White Smoke with you

The work on this page doesn't stay here. Save a card and the color arrives in your file, your deck or your board already decided.