Describing Skin Tones

[ysabetwordsmith]

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.

Comments

Well...

[helgatwb]

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.

Re: Well...

[ysabetwordsmith]

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

Re: Well...

[raze]

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.

[blitzwing]

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).

[alexseanchai]

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

[(Anonymous)]

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

[peoriapeoriawhereart]

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

NO FAIR!

[dialecticdreamer]

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!)

Re: NO FAIR!

[ysabetwordsmith]

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.

[zeeth_kyrah]

"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.

Yes...

[ysabetwordsmith]

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

[gingicat]

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

[peoriapeoriawhereart]

A studded suet pudding.

[catsittingstill]

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.

[peoriapeoriawhereart]

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.

[raze]

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.

Yes...

[ysabetwordsmith]

>> 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.

[peoriapeoriawhereart]

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.

Well...

[ysabetwordsmith]

>> 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.

[brushwolf]

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.

Hmm...

[ysabetwordsmith]

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

[rowyn]

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.

[marina-bonomi.livejournal.com]

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).

Thoughts

[ysabetwordsmith.livejournal.com]

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

[jeriendhal.livejournal.com]

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

Well...

[ysabetwordsmith.livejournal.com]

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.

[valarltd.livejournal.com]

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...

[westrider.livejournal.com]

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

Finally, the perfect occasion...

[rowangolightly.livejournal.com]

...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.