Posted under General
Bumping as I ran into this and it seems never to have been resolved.
I'd have to agree with the latter posts. Just use dark_skin for anything darker than Caucasian, as the opposite to pale_skin. And tan, like bespectacled, for characters with a canonically lighter skin tone than portrayed.
One could also add very_dark_skin if such a distinction is really needed. (akin to very_long_hair).
-1 for making tan be for "characters with a canonically lighter skin tone than portrayed."
If you want a tag for that, give it a name that's less likely to be misused.
If we do go with making dark_skin a very general tag (which would be the easiest thing to do, in my opinion), then a very_dark_skin to match very_long_hair sounds like a good plan.
Looking at the tan wiki again, it seems to me "characters with a canonically lighter skin tone than portrayed" is already its target.
It's rather hard to determine a suntan in the absence of tanlines (in which case there is that), or canonical knowledge.
If it is to be used as a color/tone, maybe light brown skin or something would fit better.
Currently it seems to be used as a bit of everything.
But then the proposed solution was to basically move dark skin up the tone range slightly while extending Caucasian's (i.e. no tag) range down slightly (which, afais, would to be more correct anyway as many users seem to think Caucasian = pale skin) to assimilate tan's usage as a tone, and create very dark skin for the very dark tones, using tan only for "noticeably darker than canon".
Either way, tan can be prone to conflicting usage, and if this is deemed too problematic, maybe it should be aliased to dark skin or tanlines, and new tags created for "noticeably darker than canon", and the "light brown" tone if those are wanted?
In short: stop using tan as a color/tone, rectify the Caucasian -> Darker boundary, add very dark skin tag.
The boundaries will always be somewhat subjective anyway, it's of no real use to be too specific.
Tan can disappear, be aliased, or its wiki clarified to "noticeably darker than canon".
Ignoring the "what happens to tan" issue, this seems to be about the general trend the thread is taking.
