Six characters, a pound sign in front, and apparently no pattern at all — that's what a hex color looks like the first time you copy one out of a design file. #FF6B35 means nothing to the eye. But it's not random, and once the logic clicks, you'll never need to guess at a color code again.
Split it into three pairs
Every hex color is six characters split into three pairs, and each pair controls one color channel:
Red channel
Green channel
Blue channel
Mix red FF, green 6B, and blue 35 together and you land on the warm orange in the swatch above. That's the whole system: three values, one for each channel of light a screen can emit.
Why letters show up in the numbers
Each pair is a number from 0 to 255, but written in base 16 (hexadecimal) instead of the base 10 we use day to day. Base 16 needs more digits than 0–9 provides, so it borrows A through F to represent 10 through 15. That's why FF is the highest possible value (255 — full brightness on that channel) and 00 is the lowest (zero — none of that color at all).
Three numbers everyone should recognize
#000000— black. All three channels at zero.#FFFFFF— white. All three channels at full.#808080— middle gray. All three channels at an equal, medium value.
Whenever all three pairs match, you get a shade of gray — color only appears once the channels start to differ from each other.
So when is RGB or HSL actually better?
Hex is compact and is what most CSS and design software defaults to, but it's not always the easiest format to work with by hand. RGB spells the same three numbers out in plain decimal (rgb(255, 107, 53)), which is easier to scan and tweak manually — useful when you're nudging a color slightly brighter or darker. HSL changes the approach entirely, describing color by hue (the color wheel position), saturation (how vivid), and lightness — which makes "make this 10% darker" or "same hue, less saturated" a one-number edit instead of recalculating three channels at once.
Converting without doing the math
You don't need to convert hex to decimal by hand. Our Color Converter keeps Hex, RGB, and HSL in sync — edit any one of the three and the others update instantly, with a live swatch so you can see the result before you commit to it.