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.

[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

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.

Re: NO FAIR!

[dialecticdreamer]

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?

Re: NO FAIR!

[ysabetwordsmith]

>> 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.

Re: NO FAIR!

[stardreamer]

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.

Re: NO FAIR!

[stardreamer]

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.

Re: NO FAIR!

[ysabetwordsmith]

>> 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.

Re: NO FAIR!

[dialecticdreamer]

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

[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?

[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.

Re: Well...

[(Anonymous)]

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.

Re: Well...

[(Anonymous)]

I forgot to sign again.

Sincerely,
Firstar28

[peoriapeoriawhereart]

A studded suet pudding.

[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.

[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.

[gingicat]

*laughs and laughs*

[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.

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.