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Show HN: Simple algorithm and color space to generate diverse skin tones

616 points · 100 comments · automatoney

s1mon · 1785864936 · focus · HN ↗
It's always entertaining to try to understand these things from first principles. Color and skin color in particular are very complex things to measure and model. It's not just a physical quantity, it's also a matter of human perception based on lighting and a host of factors.
It seems like some work was done to research existing approaches, but I don't see any reference to Pantone Skin Tones [0]. Without intending to, I've worked on 3 different projects which involved measuring skin tones for makeup applications. The Pantone range is not 100% perfect, but it's pretty well done and easy to understand. There are two axes: a light/dark one, and red-yellow one [1].
[0] <a href="https://www.pantone.com/na/en-us/skintone" rel="nofollow">https://www.pantone.com/na/en-us/skintone
[1] <a href="https://cosmeticsbusiness.com/pantone-skintone-guide-80945" rel="nofollow">https://cosmeticsbusiness.com/pantone-skintone-guide-80945
1. ptmkenny · 1785866165 · focus · HN ↗
  There's also the Monk Skin Tone Scale by Dr. Monk and Google (available under a CC attribution 4.0 international license). It was developed for machine learning, so it's not exactly the same use case, but it provides 10 colors in a variety of formats, including hexadecimal. <a href="https://skintone.google/get-started" rel="nofollow">https://skintone.google/get-started

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