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suddenly relevant to my podficcing career
Sep. 2nd, 2010 10:22 amI remember some people complaining about who could/couldn't pronounce Saito's name in Inception. So how is it correctly pronounced?
Sep. 2nd, 2010
on being a pinkskin
Sep. 2nd, 2010 08:53 pmBecause I can't find significant portions of my stage make-up kit, I went to buy a basic Ben Nye kit from a costume shop today. I got them to whip out the board of foundation colors so I could do match test to my skin and what really struck me was:
All these dozens of variations of human skin tone, and Ben Nye is pretty good about having all kinds of races represented, and it's really a lot of shades of brown.
This is part visual arts training and part intentional self-deprogramming about race, but, whiteness is a social construction, nobody is actually #FFFFFF white, and when you look at skin colors as paint pots it becomes really obvious that pretty much all skin tones have more in common with raw umber (the color you mix into paint when you want the main hue to be less in-your-face) than anything else.
When I watch other students in my class think of those colors in Ben Nye pots as skin tones, it gets weirder for me: many of these (mostly white) girls thought they'd been given a a tone too dark for their skin, that the costume shop had run out of their color and they'd been poorly served. The girl next to me had a "tan rose" pot. I looked at it and looked at her and told her to put some on her hand and see how it blended. And it did. She was very startled at this development. Guess what, honey, you are not snow white. You wouldn't be no matter where you lived and you walk around in the sun in Valley of Hell so actually, you're pretty tan. A color called tan rose? I am shocked, shocked I say, that that matches you.
But even though white people know they are not actually literally white, they assume they are lighter than they are. And maybe even--subconsciously, I'm going to suggest, to give them the benefit of the doubt--want make-up a shade lighter than they think they are out of desire to meet our society's white beauty ideal.
All these dozens of variations of human skin tone, and Ben Nye is pretty good about having all kinds of races represented, and it's really a lot of shades of brown.
This is part visual arts training and part intentional self-deprogramming about race, but, whiteness is a social construction, nobody is actually #FFFFFF white, and when you look at skin colors as paint pots it becomes really obvious that pretty much all skin tones have more in common with raw umber (the color you mix into paint when you want the main hue to be less in-your-face) than anything else.
When I watch other students in my class think of those colors in Ben Nye pots as skin tones, it gets weirder for me: many of these (mostly white) girls thought they'd been given a a tone too dark for their skin, that the costume shop had run out of their color and they'd been poorly served. The girl next to me had a "tan rose" pot. I looked at it and looked at her and told her to put some on her hand and see how it blended. And it did. She was very startled at this development. Guess what, honey, you are not snow white. You wouldn't be no matter where you lived and you walk around in the sun in Valley of Hell so actually, you're pretty tan. A color called tan rose? I am shocked, shocked I say, that that matches you.
But even though white people know they are not actually literally white, they assume they are lighter than they are. And maybe even--subconsciously, I'm going to suggest, to give them the benefit of the doubt--want make-up a shade lighter than they think they are out of desire to meet our society's white beauty ideal.
