Understanding skin pigmentation is vital to artists, beauticians, fashion experts, and color analysts. In my last post, I explained why picking whether your skin is pink or yellow will not help you determine whether warm or cool colors are right for you. Instead, I suggested you try to determine whether your skin is blue or orange, which kind of sounds ridiculous, but is actually based on the realities of melanin in the skin.
- Blue = Very little melanin: Skin with very little melanin will appear bluish from the light reflecting off blood veins and diffused through the skin. Color for Men calls this a “blue undertone” and assigns people of this skin type to Winter (dark hair) and Summer (light hair) color schemes, which include cool colors to go with the cool blue of your skin.
- Orange = Pheomelanin: Pheomelanin is the more rare of two types of melanin and creates a pigmentation in the skin ranging from yellow to red-brown. In very limited quantities, pheomelanin will combine with the blue vascular layer to create a cool, greenish yellow skin tone (sallow). However, with any intensity, it will overwhelm the coloration of blood vessels and create the warm “golden undertone” that is the signature of Autumn and Spring color types. Indeed, on the spectrum between yellow and red-brown lies orange, which my last post noted is the very definition of a warm color. Unlike the far more common eumelanin, pheomelanin does not create a UV-protecting tan, which is why Color for Men notes that Autumns burn easily.
Unfortunately, this blue/orange dichotomy works for only a small fraction of the world’s population. Eumelanin provides the black to brown pigment that colors the skin of most non-European people, for whom Color Me Beautiful provides very little coverage. In fact, 90% of the men photographed in Color for Men are white as are all of the models used as examples on the Color Me Beautiful website. Even more recent varieties of this approach to color coordination come off as racist, as evidenced by the comments on this article. People of color interested in learning more about selecting the right color palette for them might be interested in Darlene Mathis’s Women of Color.
