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Particularly in the world of beauty, there is a wild myth that only three skin tones exist: fair, medium, and deep.
Thankfully, one woman is responding with the beautiful, near-fathomless truth of the human color spectrum, one photo at a time.
Brazilian photographer Angelica Dass is capturing every skin tone in the world with a project that uses Pantone.
Yeah, Pantone, that color selection system that publishers and designers use. You probably know it for its highly coveted color of the year.
After Dass takes a portrait of a volunteer model, she matches the background with the exact same color code as an 11-pixel portion of the model's face.
The exercise aims to expand the definition of diversity and show how much skin tone really differs from person to person.
Dass uses the codified Pantone system because it "dilutes the false preeminence of some races over others based on skin color or social condition."
Basically, there are no racial biases in a coded jumble of letters and numbers.
When will the project end? Dass simply calls it a "work in progress" and isn't setting any goals or end dates for it.
She's just going to keep at it until she feels it has served its purpose.
But as Dass would probably tell you herself, the universe's expanse of skin tones is positively limitless.
So really, Humanae could live on... well, forever.
And we really hope it does.
Because every skin tone is beautiful.
And they all deserve to be seen.
You can hear Dass talk about "Humanae" in her TED Talk below:
