Taupe is #483C32. Red 72, green 60, blue 50. That is the value Wikipedia and most hex lookups give, attributed to Maerz and Paul’s 1930 Dictionary of Color, and it is a very dark, slightly warm brownish grey. The word is French for mole, the animal, and the old dark value is a fair match for a mole’s fur.
Nobody shopping for a taupe sofa means that colour. When the xkcd colour survey collected names from 222,500 sessions in 2010, the public’s taupe came out as #B9A281, a light, sandy greyish beige. Paint companies agree with the public, not the dictionary.
#483C32 · L* 26.3, C* 8.8, hue 67.2
#B9A281 · L* 67.8, C* 20.6, hue 80.5
This is the fourth colour word in a row where I have found a reference hex and a popular meaning that have drifted apart, after chartreuse, periwinkle and mauve. Taupe is the biggest gap yet. The method is the same as those pieces: hex to CIELAB under D65, distances in CIEDE2000, and one just noticeable difference taken as 2.3 units, from our own JND measurement. The commercial names come from the open color-names list (version 10.28), which has 74 colours with taupe in the name.
The two taupes are 18 JNDs apart
Reference taupe and crowd taupe are 41.3 CIEDE2000 units apart, about 18 just noticeable differences. For scale, the two mauves were 26.3 apart, and those sat on opposite sides of the pink and purple boundary. The two taupes are further apart than that while sharing roughly the same hue.
Almost all of the gap is lightness. The crowd’s taupe is 41.6 L* lighter. Its chroma is higher by 11.7, and its hue is 13.3 degrees yellower. If you darken the crowd’s taupe to the reference lightness and change nothing else, the distance drops from 41.3 to 7.7. So the two taupes are mostly the same idea, a muted warm grey, held at two very different depths. One is the colour of a mole. The other is the colour of a living room wall.
The hex code is the outlier
I sorted all 74 named taupes by lightness to see where the reference value falls among them.
It is the second darkest of 75. Only one name, Taupe Brown at #483C30, is darker, and that one is a near copy of the reference with the blue turned down by two steps. 57 of the 74 have an L* above 60. Only 10 of them are closer to the reference than to the crowd’s taupe.
The median of the whole set works out to #B0A094. That is 7.8 units from the crowd’s taupe and 39.4 from the reference. So the paint industry and the survey respondents landed in nearly the same place on their own, and the dictionary value is the one left standing alone. My opinion: if you are writing a product listing or a design brief, the hex code in the colour box is the wrong taupe to use. It will look like chocolate next to anything else sold under the same name.
#B0A094 · L* 67.0, C* 9.6, hue 69.8
Is taupe brown or gray?
This is the question people actually search, and it has a measurable answer. For any colour you can ask how far it is from a perfectly neutral grey of the same lightness. A colour that sits within one JND of that grey looks grey. Further out, you start to see a hue.
The reference taupe is 7.9 units from grey, 3.4 JNDs. The crowd’s taupe is 14.2 units, 6.2 JNDs, because it carries more chroma. Then I ran the same test over every family in the colour-names list, using the median for each.
Taupe lands at 8.4 units, 3.7 JNDs from grey. Brown is at 17.2, 7.5 JNDs. In plain terms, a typical taupe is about twice as close to grey as a typical brown is, and nowhere near close enough to be grey. Not one of the 74 taupes is within a single JND of neutral, and only four are within two. The nearest is Light French Taupe, #C2C0BB, which reads as a warm off-white.
So my answer is that taupe is a grey with a visible warm cast. It is a brownish grey, not a greyish brown. The word order matters: a greyish brown, like the survey’s own “greyish brown” at #7A6A4F, carries 17.6 chroma and sits 5.5 JNDs out. Taupe is quieter than that.
Why taupe can lean pink, yellow or neither
Low chroma has a side effect that explains a lot of taupe arguments. When a colour is close to grey, rotating its hue barely changes how it looks. For the reference taupe, you can swing the hue across 23.2 degrees and stay within one JND of where you started. For saddle brown it is 7.8 degrees. Brown has a hue you can pin down. Taupe mostly does not.
The commercial names use that freedom. Of the 74 taupes, 14 sit below 50 degrees of hue, which is the rosy side, names like Rose Taupe and Mauve Taupe. 18 sit at 80 degrees or above, on the yellow and khaki side. The other 42 are in between. A paint chip labelled taupe can be pinkish or greenish beige and still be a fair use of the word, because at that chroma the hue is a suggestion. The useful thing to check on a taupe is its lightness and how grey it is. The hue is the least reliable number of the three.
Taupe vs greige
Greige is a newer word, grey plus beige, and it is now searched about as often as “what is taupe.” Designers tend to describe them as two distinct neutrals. Measured, they are close to one colour.
The 12 greiges in the list have a median of L* 69.5, chroma 9.4, hue 82.4. The 74 taupes have L* 67.0, chroma 9.6, hue 69.8. Lightness and chroma are near identical. The one difference is that taupe sits 12.6 degrees further toward red, and a typical taupe’s one-JND hue spread is 21.8 degrees, so that shift is smaller than the eye can resolve at this chroma. The two medians are 2.78 CIEDE2000 units apart, 1.2 JNDs. Side by side on a wall you could probably tell them apart. Across a room, or from memory, you would not.
#B4A89A · 2.78 units from the median taupe
If there is a rule of thumb in the data, it is that greige is the slightly lighter, slightly yellower member of the pair, and taupe the slightly warmer and pinker one. I would not pay for a repaint over it.
Taupe vs beige
Beige is a genuinely different colour. The median beige in the list is 10.5 units from the median taupe, about 4.6 JNDs. Comparing the survey’s two values, beige #E6DAA6 is 19.0 L* lighter than the crowd’s taupe, 17.4 degrees further toward yellow, and 6.8 higher in chroma. Beige is the lighter, cleaner, yellower neutral. Taupe has more grey in it and less light, which is why it reads as the more serious of the two in interiors.
On the grey-distance chart, beige sits 10.4 units from grey against taupe’s 8.4, with mushroom and khaki in the same band. The whole neutral vocabulary between grey and brown is packed into a range of about two JNDs, which goes some way to explaining why paint names in this area run to the hundreds.
Which taupe should you use?
For anything people will see next to other taupe products, use something near the median, #B0A094, or the survey’s #B9A281 if you want it a little sandier. Reserve #483C32 for when you mean the old dark sense of the word, a mole grey, and it is worth calling it dark taupe so nobody is surprised. The survey itself kept a separate “dark taupe” at #7F684E, which is still 19.3 L* lighter than the reference.
Colour names like this are hard to hold in memory precisely because so many of them crowd into a small region. If you want to see how well you can separate them, our Name That Color mode puts a name to a swatch, and the main colour memory game shows a colour, hides it, and asks you to rebuild it. Low-chroma neutrals like taupe are some of the hardest rounds in it, for the hue reason above.
For the neighbours, see shades of brown, which measured why taupe gets called cool when its hue says otherwise, shades of gray, which counts how many greys the eye can actually tell apart, and what colors make brown, if you want to mix a taupe from paint.