Color has been shown to be a very important clue in the context of texture classification. However, since color is not stable across illumination changes, color invariant descriptors are required when the illumination is not controlled. In this paper, we propose to characterize color textures by analyzing the rank correlation between pixels located in the neighborhood from each other. Thus, considering one distance and one direction in the image space, we obtain a correlation measure which i) is related to the colors of the pixels, ii) is not sensitive to illumination changes, iii) represents the spatial interactions between different color components of neighbored pixels. Furthermore, we show how this measure can be very fast extracted from co-occurrence matrices. The discriminative power of this descriptor is assessed on a public color texture database.