Basic Trope: Skin tones are described in tones related to food items.
- Straight:
- Alice's skin is described as "mocha."
- Bob's skin is described as "creamy."
- Exaggerated:
- Alice's skin is described as "the color of a cup of French Roast coffee with two teaspoons of cream and three pumps of vanilla, steamed to a 100-degree heat".
- Every person is described this way, and it's not just skin color: hair and eye color are, too.
- Downplayed: Alice's skin tone is simply stated as "brown" in the text, but another character says it reminds them of coffee.
- Justified:
- Bob is describing Alice this way, because he doesn't really know her as a person, he's just infatuated with her. He may or may not have a Race Fetish.
- Alternatively, Bob describes Alice in this way because he's Obsessed with Food and often thinks about the color of things in relation to his favorite snacks (for example, he'd describe something purple as "grape" or something white as "milky").
- Alice describes herself in these terms.
- It's the normal accepted convention in the setting due to the quirks of that particular society: perhaps as its one which is very racially mixed, or its actually considered a polite euphemism whilst "black", "white" etc. are considered racial slurs, or its simply a country which really likes its coffee and uses coffee-related euphemisms for all manner of things, and nobody cares less either way.
- Inverted:
- A cup of mocha is described as being the color of Alice's skin.
- Beige Prose
- Subverted:
- Alice is described as having "mocha-colored skin", but then the narrator backtracks and says, "To be honest, Alice's skin didn't really look like any sort of drink."
- Bob is drinking coffee and says his drink reminds him of Alice's skin tone... because he's drinking it out of a brown mug.
- Double Subverted:
- But Bob, who is in love with Alice, compares her skin to "satin, in the color of chocolate."
- The mug's color is also described as "mocha".
- Parodied:
- Alice is working behind the counter at Starbucks. Bob (who has No Social Skills) wants mocha, so he just points to her hand. Alice gets him exactly the drink he wants.
- Bob calls a number, orders something that sounds like a Starbucks order, and one Instant Home Delivery later, he has a dark-skinned Mail-Order Bride.
- Alice's skin is described using less "romantic" foods, like "whole wheat bread" or "hamburger patty".
- Bob tells Alice that she has "beautiful chocolate skin". Charlie then overhears this and bites Alice's arm.
- Zig Zagged: Some characters are described this way, some are not.
- Averted:
- The writer does not describe what the characters look like at all, preferring to let the audience decide for themselves.
- While Alice may be described as dark-skinned, or as wearing her hair in cornrows, it doesn't specifically say anything beyond that.
- The writer compares the skin tone of characters to non-food items, like using the word "alabaster" to describe pale skin or "copper" to describe brown skin.
- The work is a Stick-Figure Comic a la xkcd.
- Enforced:
- "We need to make our character stand out in the mind of readers. To that end, we are going to make use of Purple Prose."
- The work is a Self-Insert Fic.
- "We need to show that Bob is shallow and/or fetishizes Alice, rather than seeing her as a person."
- "We need to get that all-important Male Gaze."
- Lampshaded: "Jeez, Bob, why are you describing my skin as 'mocha'? Just say I'm black."
- Invoked: Bob is telling his friend Charles all about Alice, whom he has a crush on, and Charles asks what she looks like.
- Exploited: Alice describes herself in these terms on a dating website.
- Defied: Bob simply tells Charles that Alice is black, or describes something else about her (like her clothes, or her hairstyle).
- Discussed: ???
- Conversed: ???
Back to Starbucks Skin Scale
