Skin color palette: skin tone hex codes to copy

Is there an official skin tone palette?

No. Many palette sites hand out sets of ten beiges with no origin, and there is no standards body behind any of them. The nearest thing to a public reference is the first column above. The Monk Skin Tone Scale is free to use under Creative Commons Attribution 4.0, and Google points out why it opened it: many other scales are proprietary or limited to academic use. We read those ten codes straight from Google’s swatch files.

Using them commercially is fine as long as you credit them. Google’s suggested citation is: Monk, E. (2019). Monk Skin Tone Scale. https://skintone.google. The four ramps are ours, and they’re only numbers, so use them however you like.

Why we didn’t stop at the Monk tones

Because they weren’t designed for painting. Google calls them illustrative references for people labeling images. Try them on a drawn face and tones 1 to 6 tend to come out yellow and a little paper-like, for a reason you can measure: their hues sit further toward yellow than real skin does when Wang and colleagues measured it with a spectrophotometer. The scale is a reference for depth, and it does that job well.

So here’s how we built the ramps, and every number is open to argument:

• Depth comes from Monk: each cell keeps its row’s published lightness.
• Neutral sits on the middle of that measured range, with saturation following the same curve our skin reading uses.
• Cool and warm sit a small turn either side, toward pink and toward yellow. That’s a small move, and a true one: all of human skin sits in a narrow slice of the circle.
• Olive turns about twice as far, toward yellow-green, and gives up about a quarter of its saturation, which is what makes it look grey-green and not simply yellow.
• The deepest two rows keep a little more saturation than the curve would give them. Without it, undertone disappears on a swatch at that depth, and those rows would be four copies of one color.

They’re our illustrations, and no standard stands behind them. Color measurement isn’t perfectly even to the eye, either, so small measured gaps don’t always look small.

How do you shade skin in a drawing?

Pick one base, then build its shadows and lights from it instead of darkening with black and lightening with white. Enter any hex below, or tap a Monk tone. The sphere shows the ramp at work and every step copies.

The recipe comes down to a few habits most illustrators learn the hard way:

1. Shift hue as you go. A shadow that keeps the base hue and just goes darker looks dirty. Red in the shadows suggests blood under the surface, which is a big part of skin color.
2. Keep saturation in the shadows. Mix Monk 3 with black until it reaches Monk 8’s lightness and it comes out with about 30% of the color the published Monk 8 has. That gap is why deep skin drawn from a darkened light ramp looks grey. Give deep skin a ramp of its own.
3. Give deep skin real highlights. Lit areas on deep skin can be well above its base, and they carry color. Because our steps are proportional, a deep base still gets a highlight with a clear jump in lightness.
4. Spend saturation in the middle. Published Monk saturation peaks at tone 6 and falls toward both ends, to a small fraction of that at tone 1 and tone 10. Neighbors on a mid-depth face can take more saturation than the same step on very fair or very deep skin.
5. Check it in greyscale. If your forms hold up without color, then hue and saturation can do their work without hiding a value problem.

Why do skin tones look wrong on screen?

Usually for one of these reasons, and only the first is your fault:

• The white around them. On a white page, skin swatches look darker and duller than they do beside clothes, hair or a background of similar value. Judge them in context.
• Your display. Even Google warns that the MST colors on its page “might look off” because of your screen, and offers source files for accurate work. Night modes and warm display settings move skin more than you’d expect, since skin has so little color to spare.
• Sampling from photos. A hex picked from a portrait is the skin plus the light plus the camera. An IEEE study found that estimates of skin lightness from different images of one person varied significantly.
• Old assumptions in imaging. From the mid-1950s, photo labs checked prints against Kodak’s “Shirley cards”, which showed a white model, and researcher Lorna Roth argues film’s dynamic range was biased toward white skin. She traces the same assumption into video and digital cameras. People complained for decades about shots that exposed one skin tone and lost another.

Want to know where a sampled color really lands? Paste it into the live reader on the skin tone chart. To see these depths named, go to the skin tones guide.

Text and interface colors on skin swatches

If you’re putting labels on these colors, in an avatar picker, a shade selector or a chart, this table is computed from the published hexes using the WCAG contrast formula. WCAG’s AA level asks for 4.5:1 for body text.

Some small practical points. Name options by number or by neutral description, never “nude” or “flesh” for one tone. Don’t default to a light one. Give every tone the same size and the same care, and if you offer a reduced set, keep the deep end as finely stepped as the light end, since the Monk tones were created because older scales under-represented it.

What this palette won’t do

These swatches won’t match a foundation shade, since formulas change color on skin and brands don’t publish the hex of a bottle. For that, start from depth and undertone, using the foundation shade finder. They won’t diagnose anything or tell you about anyone’s background. And they won’t tell you your own color: the skin tone test does that, with its limits stated.

Related guides and tools

• ToolFoundation shade finderA calibrated reading of depth and undertone, translated into how shade names work.
• GuideSkin tone chartThe real scales side by side, what each is for and where common names fit.
• GuideSkin tonesThe common names, the scales that measure skin and why undertone is a separate axis.