ysabetwordsmith | Describing Skin Tones

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Describing Skin Tones

Here's a mostly tongue-in-cheek post about describing fair skin in some of the ways that dark skin is often described.

I have actually used "marzipan" as a skin tone. Also cream, peach, toast, porcelain, bisque, alabaster, grub (as in insect, not food), and uncooked bread dough. (Some of the descriptions were from a less-than-positive perspective.) Also in the white-people range are the pinkish-fair tones that are not copper, so things like ruddy, flushed, coral, and rosy apply.

Kay in Schrodinger's Heroes is Hispanic, but has fair skin, which I have described as vanilla latte: a dark cream or the palest possible brown.

Then there was the time I spent over an hour hunting around for synonyms and metaphors of "brown" that were based on things NOT associated with the slave trade, preferably things relating to African culture. Kola nut was a favorite. Ebony, which is dark brown to black, is a sacred wood in Africa and thus legit.

My desertfolk often have two or three colortones combined: rose-gold, rose-mocha, toasted-peaches-and-cream. It's very rare to see truly pale skin or very dark skin in the Whispering Sands, but they cover an enormous range in between with subtle and complex variations of ruddy, shadowy, and tawny hues. Very beautiful. Oh, and to them "melon" is specifically the color of ladyparts and they make jokes about it.

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I'm no writer, but my husband has skin the color of a glazed doughnut. The doughnut part, not the glaze part, he's half Sicilian.

My skin is pink. Like, three shades lighter but the same tone as the pink used for a baby girl's blankets.

Mine is a very pale peach or seashell, barely a shade or so darker than the new-milk of a redhead.

I am a redhead. I have a "perfect peaches and cream" complexion, according to my make-up salesperson. Most of the make-up I buy is labeled "porcelain."

Conversations with unfamiliar make-up salespeople usually go something like this: "Are you sure you want to go that pale? It's SUMMER after all." tests it on my skin "Oh wow, I guess you were right. You really are that light."

Thanks for that. I didn't already know that even though I just TOLD you that. I do NOT tan. I turn a very bright lobster red, peel, and then go back to the same color I was. I have absolutely no yellow or brown tones to my skin at all. My lower arms are a bit more on the peachy/pinkish side. My legs could definitely be described as milky and pretty much glow in the dark.

I forgot to sign again.

Sincerely,
Firstar28

Wow. I've known a few people like that, yes. My skin color changes very slightly with sun exposure ... doesn't actually provide any protection, though. I start to burn in five minutes whether my skin is peach-pale or faintly toast-colored.

My normal skin color is... I don't know, similar to the lighter tones on many blondish nondescript terrier mixes? Really, I have a photo of me holding a blondish nondescript terrier mix and we are the same color. Now I really want to describe a character as having, "skin the color of a street-cur's underbelly." "Rat ears" would also be fairly accurate for my face when I have enough blood pressure to not be kinda pale gray.

The effect is funny, but the truth is white people's skin already gets described with food items quite often (peaches n cream, whey-faced, doughy complexion, strawberry-colored X (lips, nipples, etc), like cherries, creamy, skin the color of milk, etc).

I tend to go for 'brown', 'pale brown', 'dark brown', yadda. It's workaday but it works.

I just want to point out that freshly ground beef is only a good description of fair skin if they have a *wicked* sunburn, and uncooked chicken breast is really only better if it's a skin-on chicken breast (and even then, that's pretty yellowish--not a particularly healthy person). But #16 is right on the money, and a rather pointed commentary on the Hunger Games specifically.

--Jessica

Very Scando-Americans should not wear crew cuts. They look like albino mice babies. And then they get sunburnt.

Tapioca! BOTHERATION! TAPIOCA-colored skin!

Somebody get me some melanin, PRETTY PLEASE? I want to at least be able to pass for the color of walnut meats, not their hulls or the outer husk of the meat.

It's so unfair to be ALLERGIC to one's own skin tone.

Pouting, stomping feet. (At least until I begin laughing again!)

Tapioca, vanilla, butterscotch.

I love tapioca starch, whether in balls (for pies) or powder (for thickening just about anything). It is glossy rather than cloudy, and doesn't have the gluey taste that flour often does.

Yeah, but to make tapioca pudding works best with real, whole milk. (Waah!)

OOH, I know-- I'm the creamy-tinted underside of an underdone pancake... you know the ones, still leaching off-white, gluey, sticky dough if poked the wrong way with the spatula?

OR-- and this is where it really, really isn't fair- my most tanned skin (one forearm) is the color of a roasted, skinless peanut, right down to a golden undertone. My least tanned parts are the color of skimmed milk, right down to the blue undertone.

Maybe I'm a patchwork from Frankenstein's Family, many generations later?

>> Yeah, but to make tapioca pudding works best with real, whole milk. (Waah!) <<

I've never tried making it with anything else. Ought to be possible, but would probably require some serious trial-and-error or a fine grasp of kitchen chemistry. I'd probably look a milk substitute and an oil substitute.

>> OOH, I know-- I'm the creamy-tinted underside of an underdone pancake... you know the ones, still leaching off-white, gluey, sticky dough if poked the wrong way with the spatula? <<

Yeah, that's a reasonable match for me.

>> OR-- and this is where it really, really isn't fair- my most tanned skin (one forearm) is the color of a roasted, skinless peanut, right down to a golden undertone. My least tanned parts are the color of skimmed milk, right down to the blue undertone. <<

You're just a smidge lighter than me, then. I don't have quite that blue undertone. I do tan a pale toasty gold though. And I start to sunburn in five minutes.

>> Maybe I'm a patchwork from Frankenstein's Family, many generations later? <<

Could be.

Heh. I gave up on tanning the year I lived in Florida, when I discovered that a really fabulous tan on me was everyone else's normal skin color! My skin tone has gotten somewhat ruddier with age, though, so I'm no longer as pale as I was back then.

See? It's /funny/ how we see our own skin tones, especially for those of us who aren't evenly any one color!

Are you okay with coconut? Almond?

She had skin the color of coconut milk, and brown hair rapidly turning the same...

Yeah, I'm good... in between fits of the giggles!

Actually, I've been laughing at the whole concept, because my skin tone is so amazingly IR-regular.

Well I was meaning for making your tapioca, since you have a 'milk replacement' and an oil to really get it going like it was whole.

I tan terra cotta, from a cod belly starting point.

One of my friends, it was startling seeing her after she'd had to be inside most of the time, because she had dark brown hair and white skin. She'd always been golden.

I know someone who tans bronze, or occasionally orange.

I like chocolate tapioca pudding, although it's hard to find pre-made and I'm not much of a cook. And I like the tapioca pearls in bubble tea, which are usually very dark brown.

I might describe a non-white character's skin as "like a brown/golden/peach pearl" just to be contrary. I'm used to working with dyed freshwater pearls of all different colors, so that doesn't seem odd at all to me.

>> I like chocolate tapioca pudding, although it's hard to find pre-made and I'm not much of a cook. <<

I have never had that! It sounds tasty.

>> And I like the tapioca pearls in bubble tea, which are usually very dark brown. <<

Those can be good, yes.

>> I might describe a non-white character's skin as "like a brown/golden/peach pearl" just to be contrary. I'm used to working with dyed freshwater pearls of all different colors, so that doesn't seem odd at all to me. <<

Those colors make sense to me too. I have also described dragons as resembling black pearl, which has a peacock sheen.

There's a book by a woman that married a Samoan, and when she saw the paperwork that described him as brown, waxed quite poetically that he was clearly bronze.

And yes, I've eaten peaches that could never be color-matched to a 'white' person.

>> There's a book by a woman that married a Samoan, and when she saw the paperwork that described him as brown, waxed quite poetically that he was clearly bronze. <<

It's funny how people think Doc Savage must be a white guy, he's usually filmed that way ... but the original description is "The man of bronze" and the old pulp covers tend to show with the deep, lineless tan that comes from crossing European with Northern African or Indian heritage.

>> And yes, I've eaten peaches that could never be color-matched to a 'white' person. <<

Well, there are yellow peaches and white peaches. The yellows run to Asian or Asian/American crosses. But some of the white peaches are very fair-skin-colored.

The men that read pulps 'in the day' were lily-colored only on their thighs, tending towards various shades of sun exposure.

As I recall Doc Savage, Captain Nemo and Singh Khan are all forged out of a particular tradition of 'hybrid vigor' such as Thomas Jefferson projected of a 'new race of Americans'.

As I recall the white peaches don't travel well, so mostly I've has various yellow clings.

>> The men that read pulps 'in the day' were lily-colored only on their thighs, tending towards various shades of sun exposure. <<

True, of course.

>> As I recall Doc Savage, Captain Nemo and Singh Khan are all forged out of a particular tradition of 'hybrid vigor' such as Thomas Jefferson projected of a 'new race of Americans'. <<

Well, they're not wrong. I quite liked Captain Nemo in The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen as a devotee of Kali -- and evidently with a crew that was about 1/3 medics. I guess if you plan to get in trouble all the time, you should also plan for the cleanup. Or maybe he was just carrying on the tradition of "You may kill everyone on the enemy vessel save for the navigator and the doctor."

>> As I recall the white peaches don't travel well, so mostly I've has various yellow clings. <<

Very true, white peaches are fragile.

A submarine takes a lot of doctoring, especially when calling on ports of every nation.

The slide rule is more valuable than the airgun...

So very true!

"Pink marzipan" works well for a description of skin color, especially in a fairy tale setting. It has those slightly pearl undertones to it, and European origin.

Myself, I am the color of oak wood, I think.

I've used "mahogany" and "hickory" for skin tones, I think.

My skin tone is basically "put brown-toned freckles and rosacea on baby Steve Rogers." How would you describe that in food metaphors?

A studded suet pudding.

*laughs and laughs*

I wonder, though, if part of the point of the original post, was that white is seen as normal and not needing description and non-white as departing from the norm and needing to be described so that the reader knows in just what way it departs from the norm and how far.

I wonder what it would be like to read a story in which the default was black, and only the (handful of) white characters came in for elaboration about their skin tones.

It would have to be an African novel.

Clearly several of the items do play explicitly with that "white right, toast most," and it also plays with descriptions that have something just off. Like that cauliflower, that would only be apt if they also had a skin condition.

Now, I can think of possibilities describing someone like a cucumber sandwich.

Oh there's a bunch of ways you could get there--Negro regiment in the Civil War, mostly-black neighborhood or family, black college, majority black nation on Earth--or, given that I read SF and Fantasy, a place where people are mostly black because they've always been, a colonized planet or fantasy nation where most people just are black and don't need an explanation or reason.

Another of my examples is The Blueshift Troupers, where most planets have a prevailing race with little if any variation. It's an example of the Founder Effect. Whatever group settled that planet has a background imprint on the physique and culture. Sometimes it was just one, but often a mixed group that later blended. Most of the results are people of color.

Generally the Historically Black college is going to use a lot of descriptors if they want to distinguish one co-ed from another, and not all of them will be height or bust size.

I think that is definitely the point of the original post, with the descriptions merely being excessively tongue-in-cheek to underline how silly it is. I've read a decent many novels with assumed-white characters who may have their eye color or hair color described, but unless they are an outlier even on the "white" spectrum - ie. extremely pale - their skin color is not really brought to mention. But: bam, the second a POC is brought in, let's describe in intense detail the exact shade of the skin, using as many silly metaphors as possible, as often as possible.

There also tends to be a repetition of describing said skin color, IME: yes author, we get it, black person is black, can we please not reference their skin color in EVERY sentence? If the character has been mentioned for the last 150 pages, you probably don't need to say that he clasped his dark hands.

I tend to mark skin color based on context. Where most of the characters are similar, the exceptions will stand out. In the desert I have to describe the shades of brown because they're very different from each other. In the Steamsmith series, I mark Maryam's skin as dark in most of the poems, because people might read those individually, and she's black in England, and it matters. Switch over to Kande's Quest and it doesn't come up very often, because the human characters are all black. But there's a lot of attention paid to the White Demons, who are caricatures of European features in the same way that many fantasy monsters are caricatures of African features.

>> I wonder, though, if part of the point of the original post, was that white is seen as normal and not needing description and non-white as departing from the norm and needing to be described so that the reader knows in just what way it departs from the norm and how far. <<

It is.

>> I wonder what it would be like to read a story in which the default was black, and only the (handful of) white characters came in for elaboration about their skin tones. <<

Oh, I've done that. It's one of the things that makes people think that I and my writing are weird. Only in recent times have I started seeing a stream of books that are actually set in places where all the people are brown or black and it's NOT about race. Nigerian SF, for instance.

Funny how those songs of nut-brown maids never made the transition from Scottish song to the American market. We may be talking acorns and pecans, but it's not all pails and basins of milk and cream.

"Whiteness" required a blindness because attention was reserved for the "Other". This is why that blindness is unveiled when the body is female. 'Alabaster' and 'saucer of milk' aren't typically attached to Marines.

>> Funny how those songs of nut-brown maids never made the transition from Scottish song to the American market. We may be talking acorns and pecans, but it's not all pails and basins of milk and cream. <<

Not the mainstream, but they're all over the folk and Renaissance circuits. I encountered one bard who was singing in half a dozen different languages including Gaelic and Welsh, so occasionally they are even available in the original languages.

>> "Whiteness" required a blindness because attention was reserved for the "Other". This is why that blindness is unveiled when the body is female. 'Alabaster' and 'saucer of milk' aren't typically attached to Marines. <<

*snicker* Until you hit the military pr0n.

>>'Alabaster' and 'saucer of milk' aren't typically attached to Marines. <<

*snicker* Until you hit the military pr0n.

I think that would have to be military erotica. Note because erotica has to be literary, but because I think 'saucer of milk' and Marine is meta enough/subjective enough to disconnect from porn.

All of this is far more poetic than describing human skin tones as some variety of red- or yellow-shifted orange. I myself am a very light, fairly desaturated yellow-orange. Admittedly it's a lot more fair but wow, it lacks romance.

Tones for reddish to yellowish skin: red ochre, yellow ochre, terra cotta, brick, copper, dark peach, tawny, rufous, gingery, fawn, honey, cinnamon, cherry wood.

I find white-people-skin annoying to describe because it's the such a wishy-washy color. It's not white. It's not even a shade of white, like cream or ivory (or mashed potatoes, or mayonnaise). It's a light yellow-orange. "Pale peach" is close. Apple sauce is close-ish too, although "the inside of an apple" is way too pale unless one is describing a Caucasian vampire or corpse. Baked (and not dyed) marzipan is probably about right too.

I've used 'chalky' forsomeone I saw with...well, the Northern/British version of a very light skin tone, no olive or pink tinge visible (at the time I wondered whether the lady in question might have been ill), and, in winter, I've been described as 'mozzarella'- or 'meadow mushroom'-colored (pale with a greenish undertone).

I've used "chalky" too. I hadn't stopped to think that very pale olive would indeed be pale with a hint of green.

I think I'm glad I stick to writing Furry characters for the most part.

That's fine. Fur is easier to describe in some ways. I like furries too. Riffing on our food metaphors -- peach, kiwi fuzz, coconut coir, artichoke heart.

I got in trouble for creamy. I used it too close to where I described her bosom as "mounds." So the reviewer got hung up on her creamy mounds...

I've actually seen a similar comparison with ground beef used. I think by Warren Ellis, but I'm not sure.

...in which to tell my skin tone anecdote.

Prefaced with a bit if info: I am a true mutt. My ancestry is Scottish, Irish, English, Welsh, German, Navajo, Cherokee and Mohawk. This is not in descending order because the only ancestry I know for certain is that my Dad's Grandmother was German, his father was Irish and Scottish and that my Mother's Grandmother was an Irish woman straight off the boat who married a Cherokee saddle maker and that my Mother's Father was full Navajo (a fact we didn't discover until about 15 years ago and a fact which, oddly, ended my sister's marriage.)

All that to say that even though I am 1/4 Navajo, I am white. Although I am a bottle redhead, I have a true redhead's physicality, skin tone and temperament.

I have always quipped that my skin tone is "underside of dead fish white" which, while not quite accurate, always gets a laugh.

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