~ DMC Color Chart ~
Every DMC embroidery floss number with its hex and RGB value, grouped by colour family so you can find a shade rather than scroll a list. Paste any colour and the finder below returns the closest threads by perceptual distance — including how close they actually are, which is the part a printed chart cannot tell you.
Paste a hex code or pick a colour. Results are ranked by ΔE00, the perceptual distance used in colour science — not by RGB arithmetic, which disagrees with the eye on exactly the dark and saturated shades floss is full of.
ΔE00 below 1 is generally invisible; 1–2 is visible only side by side; above 10 most people read it as a different colour.
Every colour links to itself, so you can send someone straight to the number you mean.
Values are reconstructed from the R/G/B integer columns of published DMC tables rather than from their hex strings, because the widely-circulated source spreadsheet had several hex values mangled by Excel — 221 stored as "8.83E+45", 699 with its leading zero dropped. Rebuilding from the integers reproduces every documented correction exactly, which makes the correction list unnecessary rather than merely trusted.
Where two sources disagreed, a third and fourth arbitrated. Eleven rows in one source had a displayed hex that contradicted its own RGB columns; the RGB columns won eight of the nine that could be checked independently. DMC 309 is the one genuine outlier: two sources give a grey-brown for a thread named "Rose Dark", which cannot be right, so the independently-sourced value is used instead.
489 in the standard cotton range, which is what this chart lists. That includes the 35 two-digit numbers (01 Tin, 07 Driftwood, 31 Blueberry and so on) added to the range more recently, which many older charts still omit.
They are reconstructed from the RGB values published for the DMC range and cross-checked against three independent sources; where two disagreed, a fourth was used to arbitrate. DMC itself does not publish a machine-readable RGB table, so any digital chart — this one included — is an approximation of dyed cotton, which also shifts between dye lots. Use it to narrow down, and confirm against a physical colour card before buying a lot of thread.
Black — the single most used number in cross stitch. Its counterpart at the other end is B5200, a bright snow white, which is distinct from Blanc: Blanc is very slightly warm, B5200 is pure. Charts that print both as #FFFFFF are wrong, and it matters when you are stitching them next to each other.
Because RGB distance disagrees with the eye. Measured from black, pure red is perceptually nearer than white even though white is further away in every RGB channel. Floss ranges are full of dark and saturated shades where that gap is largest, so an RGB-ranked "closest thread" sends you to the wrong skein.
Yes — the cross stitch pattern maker matches every pixel to this palette and outputs a chart, a thread list and a printable PDF. This page is the reference; that tool is the conversion.