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

[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.

Well...

[ysabetwordsmith]

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.