skin tone

Trope-a-Random: Blue Skinned Space Babe

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Blue Skinned Space Babe: I wasn’t actually going to bother with this one, but having been reading this:

Outsider

…recently, and noting the registry of blue people, well.

There are some.

Eldrae blood is blue, a lovely shade of deep indigo, which has a lot to do with the particular transport mechanisms they’re using in place of hemoglobin. That, though, doesn’t actually affect their basic skin color all that much, since ‘twould seem that eldrae skin cells aren’t quite as translucent as human ones, which is why the baseline as seen in the eseldrae race is white. By which I do not mean “kinda pink”, like so-called “white” humans; I mean white, as in new milk, cream, and not-quite-but-almost albino. Darker (natural; not any of the fifty-seven artificial clade skin tones) eldraeic skin tones, on the other hand, are generally on the pink spectrum – varying all the way down to “rosy copper” in the lumeneldrae – but that’s got nothing to do with blood, and everything to do with pheomelanin and various structural variants on same.

The exception to this is the kireldrae, the smallest of the eldraeic races, one of whose racial characteristics is a certain translucency of skin, and who therefore often are a lovely shade of pale blue. Emphasis on pale: go with the syreen or Outsider’s loroi here for your envisioning, rather than the asari or the jotuns.

So, yeah, we have a few. Probably less than 1% of the population.

(As a side note: of course, any eldrae of any of their races who’s currently blushing and/or flushed is rocking the blueness, ’cause that is down to blood coloration.)

Trope-a-Day: But Not Too White

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But Not Too White: Averted, since this meme never even had the preconditions to become established on Eliéra. The eldrae simply don’t tan in response to UV light, no matter how long they spend working, walking, or basking in the sun.  (Essentially, their ancestors – thanks to the superior immune systems and DNA error-correction mechanisms that go along with their Immortality – no longer gained any evolutionary advantage from being able to tan; and either in the course of that or at some later point, the mechanism broke.  For much the same reason, they can’t sunburn, either – although sunstroke may still be an issue.

Note, of course, that they still have eumelanin – eldrae skin tone does vary, from not-quite-but-almost-albino-white in the eseldrae to coppery in the lumeneldrae, lips and other body parts are pheomelanin pink, and so forth – so the breakage appears to be upstream, in the mechanism that causes melanin release from melanocytes and increased melanogenesis in response to UV exposure.)