Normalizing Human Skin Colors for User Interaction

Question

A while ago I came across this answer that introduced me to the obscure (at least for me) ISO 5218: a standard for representing human sexes (or is it genders? - thanks @Paul).

For a pet project I'm working on I need my database schema to store the skin color of a person, and I'm wondering if a similar standard exists. All my life I've heard people using terms such as "White", "Caucasian", "Black", "Blonde", "Brunette", "Afro", "Albino" and so on, but after some research in Wikipedia I've realized that everybody is wrong, because those words can all have different meanings:

• White: yeah, it's a color
• Caucasian: defines the race
• Black: yet another color
• Blonde: skin or hair color
• Brunette: again, skin or hair color
• Afro: "hairdo"?!
• Albino: also represents more than the skin color

The Wikipedia has the following about human races:

• Caucasoid
• Congoid
• Capoid
• Mongoloid
• Australoid

Seriously, Mongoloid?! I don't know about the connotations of the English language but in my native language (Portuguese) that's a synonym for a person who suffers from the Down syndrome disorder...

This Wikipedia page also has some interesting additional information:

Johann Friedrich Blumenbach (1752-1840), one of the founders of what some call scientific racism theories, came up with the five color typology for humans: white people (the Caucasian or white race), more or less black people (the Ethiopian or black race), yellow people (the Mongolian or yellow race), cinnamon-brown or flame colored people (the American or red race) and brown people (the Malay or brown race).

The problem with using races (besides the horrific names chosen and scientific racism), is that they don't necessarily represent the skin color of a person... Take the following photo from Wikipedia:

The most serious attempt I could find to classify skin color is the Von Luschan's chromatic scale:

Most people however, are not aware of their von Luschan's scale (myself included). I also though of having the user visually specifying the color of their skin tone but that could lead to some problems due to the different color profiles used by the operating systems / monitors.

There is also a more general von Luschan's scale used to classify sun tanning risk:

1. von Luschan 1-5 (very light).
2. von Luschan 6-10 (light).
3. von Luschan 11-15 (intermediate).
4. von Luschan 16-21 ("Mediterranean").
5. von Luschan 22-28 (dark or "brown").
6. von Luschan 29-36 (very dark or "black").

Since this can become a very sensitive topic for some people I'm wondering what would be the best way to store this information in a normalized database. Is there a correct globally accepted standard to describe skin color without affecting susceptibilities while using straightforward terms and avoiding complicated and unfamiliar definitions such as von Luschan's scale?

Similar standards exist for eye and hair color. How would you approach the skin tone terminology?

Answer 1

olayforyou.com defines these skin tones

alt text http://www.freeimagehosting.net/uploads/151ab0ddd7.jpg

• very fair
• fair
• olive
• dark
• very dark

Any person using cosmetics regularly would understand these terms. These rest of us are just guessing :-)