Brazilian-born photographer Angélica Dass has photographed thousands of people around the world for her project Humanae, documenting the variety of human skin colors with Pantone references. She started in 2012; by around 2018 the project held some 4,000 portraits from 18 countries.
I’ve always been interested in skin tones, and especially undertones. Like Dass, I seem to have perceived color differently from the people around me. As a child, I never quite understood why people were described as black or white. To me, only people with albinism came close to white, and I had never actually seen anyone whose skin was black. Everyone had their own shade.
What I find most remarkable about her photographs is seeing people with almost identical skin tones but completely different hair and eye colors.
Naturally, I tried to find my own Pantone color. I think it might be 58-6 C.
Watch: The beauty of human skin in every color (TED talk by Angélica Dass)
Sources
- Pantone SkinTone Guide
- The photographer creating a Pantone colour chart for the human race (Huck)
- 4,000 skin colors in Pantone squares (artnet)
- The stick figure on the door: unconscious ways we exclude each other (The Correspondent)
Related: Accessibility and inclusion · The pond