During my research on the topic of skin tones/skin colors, I came across the ambitious Humanae project by Spanish artist Angelica Dass. Her aim is to put together a catalog of skin tones based on the Pantone classification.

The Pantone Matching System is the name of an internationally used color system that is used primarily in the graphics and printing industry. To facilitate the exchange of information between different parties, the system assigns numbers to the colors.

Angelica Dass photographs people’s heads and bare shoulders in front of a white background. The nudity makes the socio-cultural background of the subjects secondary. She has consciously asked people of all religions and nationalities for permission to photograph them for her database, which now contains well over 2,500 photos. She has “photographed deaf and blind people, people in favelas in Rio, and multimillionaires in Chicago,” she says.

What makes these pictures unique is that, before publishing them, Angelica Dass colors the original white background of the photos in the shade of the nose of her models. The idea behind this is that the nose changes color the fastest – under sunlight, with the changing seasons, with the flu or the influence of alcohol. This can certainly be understood as a political statement: humans change color all the time. So why pigeonhole them according to their color? She then records this color tone under the photo – in the Pantone classification.

What is fascinating about this is that in this way people from very different cultural backgrounds are given the same Pantone identifier . In an interview she gave to Spiegel, Angelica Dass reports that it could happen that an African American and an Indian have the same skin tone.

For writers, this database is an ideal training ground. I have been working on a list of skin tones for some time now, collecting descriptions from literature and matching them to the skin color mentioned. In this way, I am trying to put together a basic collection of names for different skin tones.

The second step, of course, is to apply these descriptions to a specific object. And for this purpose, Angelica Dass’s Humanae project is extremely helpful. You can find it at Tumblr at: humanae.tumblr.com/. You can also find out more about the project on the homepage of Angelica: angelicadass.com/humanae-work-in-progress/.

If you need a tool to convert Pantone colors into RGB or hex values, for example to match them with my skin tone list, you can use the free Color Cop. Similar to Photoshop, this tool allows you to quickly pick up a color via an eyedropper and then display the color value as an RGB or hex value.

If you want to go the other way, there is also a tool for that. The color converter from ngin.de can be used to convert CMYK process colors into the corresponding Pantone colors. This way you can see if there are portraits of Angelica Dass, for example, that match the descriptions of certain color types.