About
About this site
whatcoloristhis.com exists to answer one question well: what is that color? Behind that question is a bigger one, because color is how people say things words can't. A painter reaching for the exact blue of a late evening, a designer holding a brand to its warmth, a kid naming the green of a beetle's back: they are all doing the same thing, putting a feeling into a form someone else can see.
So the answer needed more than a lookup. It needed a photo analyzer, an encyclopedia, pairing guides, comparisons, a mixing chart, studio tools, and games, all running on one shared color engine, all free, and all built to hand you the color and get out of the way.
Why color
Color is a language of expression
Every craft that makes things people feel runs on color: painting, film, fashion, gardens, tattoos, quilts, interfaces, frosting. Yet the working knowledge of color has been scattered across paywalled apps, decade-old forum posts, and tools that quietly cap what they show you. We think the full spectrum belongs to everyone. Whether you mix pigment, dye fiber, or push pixels, the site treats your medium as a first-class way of working, with the same depth of data and the same respect for your craft.
That is why everything here is free, works in the browser, and never asks who you are. Expression should not have a login wall.
Coverage
Coverage and naming
16,777,216
colors a screen can show. Every single one has a page here.
31,912
human-given names in the registry. Every name is reachable.
0
photos uploaded. All image analysis runs on your own device.
Those numbers stay separate on purpose. There are 16,777,216 possible colors on a screen, and every one of them has a page. Of those, 31,912 carry names people have given them, drawn from a community-maintained dataset, and a growing subset has a full encyclopedia entry with written detail. Every color that lacks a human name still gets a precise descriptive name computed from its properties, shown beside its closest named match, so nothing is ever just a bare code. We never present the smallest of those numbers as if it were the whole story.
Method
How this site is made (the honest version)
The reference data on this site is computed by one color engine: name matching, palettes, contrast ratings, ΔE measurements, and the descriptions on color pages are all generated from the math, then checked by a human. Editorial pages like this one are human-directed and human-reviewed. We never invent credentials, fake a persona, or present a guess as a measurement. Where a value is an approximation, the page says so. The full method lives at /methodology/.
About
Who makes this
whatcoloristhis.com is an independent project, not a content farm. There is no newsroom and no ghost-written personas: a small independent studio directs the editorial and product decisions, and the color engine does the math. When you read a number here, a human decided it was worth showing and a formula produced it. That division of labor, human judgment plus computed data, is the whole model, and it is why the site can be both broad and accurate. Corrections and questions reach the maker directly at the address below.
Privacy
Privacy, in one line
Photos never leave your device, there are no accounts, and we don't run trackers. Details in the privacy policy.
Corrections
If we got it wrong
Tell us: hello@whatcoloristhis.com. Corrected pages note the fix in place. We would rather admit an error than quietly edit it away.