Lightened/Darkened skin tags

So, in an ideal world, alternate_skin_color pale_skin and alternate_skin_color dark_skin would be fully sufficient, but alternate human skin tones tend to be a sensitive subject for many people for many reasons and those searches don’t cover very dark skin characters being drawn a significantly lighter shade of dark skin or pale characters being drawn darker, but not enough to warrants the dark_skin tag. Sensitivity around skin tone changes is why blacktober art that reimagines characters with dark skin gets downvoted and dark-skinned characters drawn lighter than canon gets backlash. I think most alternate skin tones don’t need more specific tags than just alternate_skin_color *_skin, but I want to propose creating specific tags for lightened skin and darkened skin. I think many people would want to filter one or both out, and others might actively seek them out. I won’t really mind if this idea gets shot down, but I thought it was worth discussing.

you can blacklist multiple tags in one line. if someone gets in that much of a twist over alternate skin color/"raceswapped" art, tell them to add alternate_skin_color dark_skin to the blacklist.

Kaleidoscoped said:

you can blacklist multiple tags in one line. if someone gets in that much of a twist over alternate skin color/"raceswapped" art, tell them to add alternate_skin_color dark_skin to the blacklist.

Again, that doesn’t cover the inverse situation of dark skin characters being lightened, and neither does alternate_skin_color pale_skin because a lot of lightened skin doesn’t qualify for the pale_skin tag. I don’t personally have a problem with characters being drawn darker (I actively look for it sometimes, so I’d still find a darkened skin tag helpful lol), but I’m not a fan of characters drawn lighter and would like to have a tag to blacklist it if possible. (I’m not interested in starting discourse about raceswapping, just explaining why I thought creating new tags could be useful)

my post may have read like i was brushing off the topic entirely, my bad. i just put it out there to illustrate that there's already a semi-complete solution in place.

i do agree with you that, because we don't have a tag for characters with a light skin tone (only pale skin, which only covers very light skin), searching for (/excluding) lightened skin tones is not as easy as plugging in an alternate_skin_color -dark_skin search. that search has you wading through a ton of "character with skin outside the natural human range is drawn with skin within the range, or vice versa". in that sense, the existence of darkened/lightened skin tone tags could be justified, if only for enhanced searchability.

With the recent push for splitting alternate breast size in topic #32481, I think a split here in this regard would also make sense under the same logic.

I would support this, and on a related note I really don't like grouping unnatural -> natural and natural -> unnatural and unnatural -> different unnatural skin with lighter/darker skin. They're very different things and the latter two are more of a sensitive issue for some and more likely to be blacklisted than the former.

The first group seems like it would just be humanization, but that doesn't really work when you have characters like Kris and the My Little Pony: Equestria Girls characters who are already human and instead have an unnatural skintone as an artistic choice.

I do think humanization should be mutually exclusive with this tag, barring specific outliers like Cocoa Cookie, who's intentionally designed with a darker skintone than the default for that series. But that doesn't do much for the aforementioned weirdly colored humans.

The unnatural skin tones all imply colored skin, which is presumably there to prevent this from happening. But I don't really know how helpful the tag is for your search purposes.