ysabetwordsmith (
ysabetwordsmith) wrote2014-08-22 08:50 pm
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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.
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.
Well...
My skin is pink. Like, three shades lighter but the same tone as the pink used for a baby girl's blankets.
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(Anonymous) 2014-08-23 03:56 am (UTC)(link)--Jessica
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NO FAIR!
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!)
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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.
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Myself, I am the color of oak wood, I think.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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"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.
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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.
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Hmm...
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Thoughts
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Finally, the perfect occasion...
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.