Software gives you five skin tones, or sixteen million
Software gives you five skin tones, or sixteen million.
Pick a skin tone in software and you get two bad options. About five preset shades, like an emoji. Or all sixteen million colors a screen can show, with no help choosing.
Three sliders and one variety dial
Three sliders and one variety dial.
One person built a free tool for this. It turns that whole range of human skin into three simple sliders, plus one dial for how much variety you want. It runs in a browser.
Each slider means something clear
Each slider means something clear.
Those three sliders turned out to mean something clear. Deep to fair. Flushed to ochre, a golden tan. Cool to warm. And the builder never chose those meanings.
Sorted by hand, then rotated flat
Sorted by hand, then rotated flat.
The builder sorted hundreds of colors by hand, into “a person could be this” or not. Every screen color is three numbers: how much red, green, and blue. Plot the yes-colors and they make a lopsided, banana-shaped cloud, sitting crooked. Then a standard piece of math called principal component analysis rotated that cloud flat, until its own natural directions lined up with the sliders. The rotation found the directions the colors vary along. Those directions became the sliders.
One knob for variety
One knob for variety.
For the last step, the builder wrapped the flattened cloud in a ball. The ball’s size becomes one variety dial. Turn it down and every direction shrinks together, evenly, never lopping off one end. Turn it up and the tones become cartoonish, even fantasy.
At zero, one neutral tone
At zero, one neutral tone.
Turn that dial to zero and you land at the exact center: one neutral tone. If that center ever leaned one way, the space would be skewed. So the center checks the space.
Five shades or sixteen million colors. Now three sliders and a dial
Five shades or sixteen million colors. Now three sliders and a dial.
So the choice that was five shades or sixteen million colors is now three sliders and one dial. Sorted by hand, rotated by math, open for anyone to build on.
