I found the part where you talk about skin colours interesting, because it didn't match the way I think.
My skin colour can be matched fairly well by mixing yellow ochre, zinc white, and a tiny bit of crimson.
My husband's (and both my ex-girlfriends') is more of a burnt sienna than yellow ochre, still mixed with the white and a bit of crimson.
My ex-boyfriend's has almost no brown or yellow in it at all -- just the pink one gets from the crimson mixed with the white.
***
I knew, growing up, that assuming one knew someone's ethnicity by looking at them was nonsense, because I knew people who looked one thing and were another: white or blue-eyed Maori and Samoans; Sinhalese/Pakeha children, one of whom looked Melanesian and the other Arabic, and so on.
The more people are able to travel, the harder it will be to assume one knows a lot about someone's culture from their face.
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Date: 9 Dec 2010 07:49 am (UTC)I found the part where you talk about skin colours interesting, because it didn't match the way I think.
My skin colour can be matched fairly well by mixing yellow ochre, zinc white, and a tiny bit of crimson.
My husband's (and both my ex-girlfriends') is more of a burnt sienna than yellow ochre, still mixed with the white and a bit of crimson.
My ex-boyfriend's has almost no brown or yellow in it at all -- just the pink one gets from the crimson mixed with the white.
***
I knew, growing up, that assuming one knew someone's ethnicity by looking at them was nonsense, because I knew people who looked one thing and were another: white or blue-eyed Maori and Samoans; Sinhalese/Pakeha children, one of whom looked Melanesian and the other Arabic, and so on.
The more people are able to travel, the harder it will be to assume one knows a lot about someone's culture from their face.