ysabetwordsmith | 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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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!

Describing Skin Tones

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