askchapo

Follow the advice in this thread but then describe the white characters like this

RGBA hex code

Ursula Le Guin described Ged as "copper-brown" in Earthsea

Looking up creatingblackcharacters on tumblr and their website. Their whole thing is about stuff like this.

I bet there's a soil colour for every kind of human

You could try minerals.

"He resembled one of the absolute gigachads who booted the French out of Haiti"

"He looks like he floats like a butterfly and stings like a bee"

You can move the description away from the character and into their relationship with an environment or their attire.

"blended into/stood out from the pale walls of the room" or something like that.

Let's you kill 2 birds with one stone too

Nerissa's skin tone was somewhere in the valley between the two types of dark skin you tend to see in commercials—you know the kinds. I mean, go lighter than her, and you're talking about the sort of "presidential brown" type of actress you can imagine selling you a goddam toothbrush or menstrual pads or incontinence undies or something along those lines; the same type of skin that you might see in a very nicely-done photo shoot used by a college to tout its "modernity" and "diversity" without doing "too much." Or go darker than her, and you're talking about the sort of honest-to-God literally black woman where a monochrome image filter would not change her appearance an iota; the sort of skin you might find in the odd European fashion magazine here and there because it's oh-so "striking" and "against the norm" to depict clothes on skin so all-caps BLACK, in parentheses "(because such a fine Nilotic spezimen ist so exotisch.)" But our dear Nerissa was neither so comparatively light nor so absolutely dark: in the valley, as said, her skin tone was the sort of unremarkable dark-brown that especially on women in the USA tends not to lend itself to a career number of acting roles nor a career number of modeling jobs. But I guess not everybody can live up to their childhood dreams, anyways. "A shitty job is better than no job. C'est la vie," Nerissa would often say during the overtime late shifts, always with a grit of her teeth.

I dunno is that something

Well, the most famous dark skinned character in India is described as having the complexion of "the dark of rain clouds" (Krishna).

I recently heard about a site that is supposed to have a lot of good advice about this: https://writingwithcolor.com/

I have not actually read anything on it yet.

I'm going to be real with you I write a lot and I don't think I've written somebody's skin color into a visual description in like 10 years

even if I'm kind of on autopilot and I go for a simple word like "dark" I'm almost certainly backspacing and trying again

If we’re talking D&D you could use equipment as a comparison (i.e. leather, hide, burlap, copper, bronze, wood).

I know being descriptive and painting a compelling picture is part of good writing but I can’t help but feel skin tone is usually irrelevant. But this is coming from the guy who didn’t mention the race of his partner to his therapist for almost two years and only did so because I was talking about thanksgiving with his family.