2005-08-11

Color theory of human skin

Whether we recognize or not, most of us consider fairer is beautiful. I feel this could be true even psychologically. In a fair skined person, their features like eye-brows, eyes, mouth are lot more visible because of the contrast. Since it is more visible, we can easily understand the expression of the person. Thus it will be easier for one to communicate or socialize with that person.

I am thinking about what are the color schemes that is suitable for each skin tone and what is the theory behind that.

Contrast theory. For a human eye certian amount of contrast is most liked. When a dark person with very less contrast with his face and hair, is not considered beautiful, scandinavian with black-colored hair is also not liked very much because of too much contrast.

Since a fairer person's face color scheme is more contrast based, his dress with more contrast will be good for him. For dark skinned person, his face scheme is not contrast based. So he must use sub-dued colors to go with that scheme.

When a specific color is being used for the shirt, that color temperature gets added to the face. A dark skinned person should use higher color temperatore of yellow as the base. The tone of yellow can change from peech to orange to yellow to green to white - all with 50% saturation and 70% brightness. With the same thoery, blue should be avoided, since it does not have any yellow.

Shorter feedback time for efficiency

This is a simple theory for social sciences:

Efficiency of a social machanism is inversely related to the time it takes to get feedback for an action.

We can apply this to many social scenarios:
  1. Teach kids. Beating is a very primitive way to achieve this. Otherwise, the reaction to a kid's action will take lot of time to reach him.
  2. Better coding.
  3. Better economy
This principle should be applied in any social system being designed. Examples of social systems: schools, various orgnizations.