AbstractThe present method of determining the correlated color temperature of an illuminant is based on the obsolete CIE 1960 u,v chromaticity diagram. A new method is proposed that is based on Hunt's color‐appearance model for unrelated colors. Analytic functions were derived for the blackbody locus in appearance space to simplify the computation. CCT was calculated for some light sources and the results were compared to those obtained by the present metho