Doomscrolling last week, I came across a post with the word “eigengrau”. The post said that it was “the color you see when you close your eyes”. It even included a hex color associated with it: #16161D. That immediately made me think of all the posts I’ve seen on the Internet about how you shouldn’t use #000 as black and instead use something softer like #111. I was connecting the dots: if this is the color we see when we close our eyes, rather than the true absence of color, then it makes sense that this kind of black feels more comfortable. It’s more natural to our eyes.
Part of me wanted to start a movement for a new HTML color named eigengrau, mapped to #16161D. At the moment, the closest HTML color keyword is black, which is less desirable than something like #111 from my experience. However, it seems that this hex color is not accurate to what this is meant to represent.
The Wikipedia entry for the term shows eigengrau occurring at luminances below approximately 10⁻⁵ cd/m² — that’s 0.00001 candelas per square meter. That’s a physical light intensity threshold, not a color value like hex. In other words, science measures eigengrau as luminance not color.
This doesn’t mean that we can’t get close using CSS. If we use the color() function with the xyz color space, we can write it in this way:
--eigengrau: color(xyz pow(10, -5) pow(10, -5) pow(10, -5));
The value of 10⁻⁵ (written above as pow(10, -5)) comes directly from the findings on the research on eigengrau. It is very possible your monitor won’t display this, and might even turn off the pixels entirely, making #000 that we were expecting to avoid.
So where did this hex code come from? In the discussion associated with the Wikipedia entry, there’s a lot of arguments about where the original hex code was introduced. The oldest they’ve discovered is from 2009. The earliest I can find is this website with a timestamp of 2005. Scrolling through the list, you can find the hex #16161D and hovering over the row will show the name “Eigengrau”. It is written in the row HTML as title="Eigengrau". Interestingly, there are other names tucked into the HTML for other colors like “Aureolin” and “Feijoa” that I’ve never heard of but appear in other, more recent, color lists around the web.
I have reached out to the author of the website for more information. It is currently unclear if this page has been updated since 2005. However, I’m not convinced that this is the source for all of these color names. I’ll update the post here if I hear back from the author.
This whole exercise about debating whether #000 is too harsh, looking for a softer alternative touches on a larger question about contrast. A research study found that “white text from a black screen could inhibit myopia, while black text on white background may stimulate myopia,” recommending against pure black on pure white due to the contrast. Skeptics push back on whether color was really the main factor, but that uncertainty cuts both ways.
The better answer is to stop asking which softer black is universally correct. Now that personalization is a key feature of the web, the ability for users to choose the colors that work best for them matters more than whichever default a designer picks. A mechanism for users to choose their own colors and other presentational settings is key. This is especially true for folks with visual impairments or other conditions that make certain color combinations difficult to read.
At best, the original interest in a name for something that I didn’t know had a name was fun. Even if it seems to be largely misunderstood. I’ll say it’s definitely a better name than “brain gray” 🧠