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Amazing Technicolor Population
aka: Amazing Technicolour Population

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Taking the term "People of Color" to a whole new level.

Saves-a-Fox: Okay, now try a skin-colored one.
Grem: You mean a white one?
K'seliss: She means a green one.
Saves-a-Fox: I mean an orange one!
Goblins

In the real world, the color range of human skin is diverse — but not infinitely diverse. The natural color of our skin comes from the colors of melanin, fat and blood: these provide only a handful of pigments in umber, amber, red and pink hues. Depending on our ethnic background, these will be layered in different proportions to color us some variation of brown.

This is not so in animation. Animators, whether they're drawing cartoon characters or building models for a video game, have the freedom to make or draw anything they want. Thus, the normal range of human skin colors needn't have any bearing on the appearance of cartoon characters. Want your characters to be blue, orange, and silver? Go right ahead! Want a dude with a purple face to live next door to a green skinned, not from space babe? The freedom's all yours, pal! If the characters are Genre Blind, their unnatural skin tones will probably go unnoticed. If not, this might be Hand Waved in different ways or lampshaded.

Giving your characters unrealistic skin tones sounds like a great way to avoid Race Tropes and unfortunate implications, doesn't it? Well, sometimes. Unfortunately, it doesn't always work like this. If a character is meant to be of a specific ethnicity, they will most likely have the "correct" skin tone and facial features for their ethnicity, regardless of anything else. It seems as if only "white people" (i.e., people with the European features of straight hair, round eyes, thin noses, thin lips, and so forth irrespective of actual skin color) get Amazing Technicolor Skin — everyone else is left out. Still, it's a nice thought. Isn't it?

Compare World of Technicolor Hair, which does the same thing but with hair colors.

See also Ambiguously Brown, for when the skin tones are within the realms of possibility, but not clearly "defined". Do not confuse with Amazing Technicolor Wildlife, where this trope is applied to animals. Related to Hair Color Dissonance where over time the viewer's brain might perceive the skin tone as something more realistic than it actually is. For when a specific real form of this trope (courtesy of Bizarre Human Biology) is treated as unusual by other characters and/or by the narrative itself, see Albinos Are Freaks.


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Other Examples:

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    Advertising 
  • Dot, Dash, Dee and Del, the mascots of PBS Kids, all have green skin. The 2022 rebrand introduced people with other skin colors such as purple and blue, along with realistic colors.

    Anime & Manga 
  • All the members from the Noah family in D.Gray-Man have... well, grey skin. That's true of the anime version, however, in the original manga color art, they're also often drawn with skin in different shades of brown.
  • Doraemon: Occurs in "Soap Bubbles". Big G draws graffiti of a character with yellow skin, red eyes, a blue nose, etc.
  • Isabelle of Paris: Adolphe Thiers is green. No, he's not an alien or a monster, he's a Frenchman, but he's green. However, the anime does imply he is Ambiguously Human.
  • Zentradi females (a.k.a. Meltrandi) in Macross mainly have natural human skin tones, but the males often have purple, green, blue, or grey skin, with green particularly predominant in the later series.
  • For inexplicable reasons, Meg's rival Non in Majokko Meg-chan has an unnatural looking white complexion. No one seems to mind, though.
  • Mazinger Z: Big Bad Dr. Hell is purple. No indication why, since he's seemingly human.
  • The Oni in Momokyun Sword are every hue under the sun, almost all unlike normal human skin tones. The fact that Onihime does have a normal human skin color is a clue to her true heritage.
  • Monster Musume have a number of exotically colored Monster Girls. Suu and Lala are blue, Yukio is snow-white and Kinu is red for example.
  • Some characters in My Hero Academia have unnatural skin colors as a result of their Quirks: Mina "Pinky" Ashido has bright pink skin as a result of acid buildup, Shihai "Vantablack" Kuroiro of Class 1-B has jet black skin, and Sir Nighteye's sidekick Kaoruko "Bubble Girl" Awata's skin is light blue. The Spin-Off My Hero Academia: Vigilantes introduces the six-armed Next-Level Villain Octoid, who also has dark black skin.
  • In the Naruto franchise, all full-blooded members of the celestial alien Ohtsutsuki Clan are pale-skinned.
  • In One Piece, Fishmen come in all sorts of colors. Sky blue, light gray, peach, purple, lime green, you name it. This is why Jack and Sasaki of the Beasts Pirates both being Fishmen come as a surprise, because they each have more human-like skintones. Keep in mind that they're both full-blooded Fishmen, not half-human/half-Fishman like Dellinger of the Donquixote Pirates, who likely inherited a human skintone from his human parent.
  • The Demon sisters from Panty & Stocking with Garterbelt, who have characteristic beet-red skin. Kneesocks turns a lighter shade of red when she blushes.
  • In a lot of anime, people in flashbacks are shown to have completely black skin (possibly referencing kabuki theatre). Revolutionary Girl Utena, for instance, gives everyone this treatment in flashbacks.
  • The Zentraedi of Robotech, like their Macross counterparts, have a mix of natural human skin tones and more unnatural colors like purple and green.
  • In Space Battleship Yamato, Gamilons are shown with human skin tones until the episode where humans first encounter one face to face. From that episode on, they're all shown to have sky blue skin. Members of the second season's evil Comet Empire are all a rather icky shade of olive green (except Invidia, for some reason). In fact, so many anime extraterrestrials have blue skin that it seems to be a kind of cultural shorthand for alienness.
    • In the Space Battleship Yamato 2199 reboot this is given a nod by having the first group of aliens the crew of the Yamato encounters be Zaltzians, a Galmilan client race who can pass for Japanese while there is another more with a distinctly reddish skin tone and the pale purple Jirellians in addition to the blue-skinned Gamilans and the green-skinned Gatlanteans.
  • Voltes V: While the Boazanians are usually Human Aliens (while the noble class has horns and the commoner class doesn't), there also exist red-skinned Boazanians like Jangal and blue-skinned ones like Zuhl.
  • In Voltron, the people from the evil planet (planet Doom in the English translation) are all different cool tones, including almost pure white, sky blue, deep cobalt blues, and even a green or brown earth tone sometimes. Coincidentally, this was true not only for GoLion (Lion Voltron), but Dairugger XV (Vehicle Voltron) as well. Blue skin seems to be Japanese cultural shorthand for "alien". In the United States, aliens are either Little Green Men or The Greys; in Japan, they're tall blue dudes.
  • Yu-Gi-Oh!: Several humanoid monsters have skin of various colors, the most notable example being Black Magician, who has blue-ish green skin in the manga, which is why most cards from the OCG/TCG have him with that color. Studio Gallop's Yu-Gi-Oh! series chose to depict Black Magician with the Adaptational Dye-Job from the Bandai card game (normal skin color, purple robe, purple hair and green rod), but kept the skin colors of two of Black Magician's evolutions from the manga (Black Magician of Chaos's blue skin and Black Paladin's green skin), while the evolutions that didn't originate from the manga have normal skin colors. Chaos Soldier is also given the same treatment, having green skin in the manga and in the OCG/TCG, but has a normal skin color in the anime. This is the opposite case for the initial Harpie Lady and her sisters, where they are given blue skin in the anime and in the early OCG/TCG, but later on, all new Harpie cards are given normal skin colors.

    Arts 
  • Primavera: Wind god Zephyrus has dark bluish-gray skin, in contrast to the other figures in the painting.
  • All of the characters in Naudline Pierre's work are bright colors unrealistic to any individual, adding to the surreal, spiritual quality the paintings are going for.
  • The Statue of Liberty was originally made of shining, reddish-brown copper, but the weather turned it green over the years. The public liked it that way so much that they resisted attempts to restore it.

    Comic Books 
  • Asterix: In Asterix and the Big Fight, when Getafix the druid becomes amnesiac, his attempts at recreating the magic potion formula end up as potions turning people into various colors (not always plain). He is thrilled by this.
  • The Demon Mages features characters with skin colors that range from "white" (Tess) to black (Ziggy) to dark-skinned blond (Tara) to gray (Tara the Drow).
  • Giant Robot Warrior Maintenance Crew: Boomie, one of the pilots who flies Herotron, has very purple skin.
  • Pops up occasionally in the Marvel Universe. People with gamma-radiation based powers will usually be green-skinned, the Atlanteans and Kree are blue-skinnednote , and, occasionally, mutants have technicolor skin.
    • This got lampshaded in Exiles when, at one point, the team had two blue-skinned girls (Namora and Nocturne) and lavender-skinned girl Blink figured Nocturne's departure was because the group had too many technicolor skin tones. Blink is an interesting example as depending on what you're reading she can have generic white features or look more like a black girl with lavender skin (which makes more sense as she is canonically from the Bahamas).
    • Runaways: Karolina is an Amazing Technicolor Population all by herself...
    • Combining gamma radiation with cosmic energy gives those subjected to it red skin.
    • A storyline in Avengers West Coast #98-100 (September-November, 1993), features a Historical Domain Crossover scenario. Lucrezia Borgia and Lizzie Borden serve as agents of the Hell Lord Satannish. Lucrezia has blue skin and Lizzie has light red skin.
    • In Planet Hulk, the Shadow People are gray, while the Imperials are red.
    • Some notable cases from X-Men include the gray-skinned Apocalypse (who, as an ancient Egyptian, would be non-Caucasian) and Skin (Latino), Sunspot (who turns really black when using his power), M's brother Emplate (gray), and possibly Penance (red-skinned).
    • The Yellow Claw, a Yellow Peril holdover from the 1950s, was initially drawn with bright yellow skin; the first Official Handbook of the Marvel Universe notes his skin color as being very much not a normal Asiatic tone due to his overuse of an Immortality Inducer elixir. This is eventually written out and the original Agents of Atlas series reintroduced him as the Golden Claw, with a normal East Asian skin colour.
    • When the colorist remembers, Domenic of ClanDestine has light green skin. His older brother Walter's transformed state is consistently a pale blue color.
  • Occasionally seen also in The DCU:
    • Martian Manhunter is a green-skinned Martian.
    • Batman
      • The Creeper is a yellow-skinned wacky vigilante.
      • Depending on the Artist, both Poison Ivy and Mr. Freeze are subject to this. In the case of the former, her skin color tends to fluctuate between standard European/Caucasian, olive, and green. In the case of the latter, he tends to be colored with either European, blue, grey, or snow-white skin.
    • Teen Titans has gold/orange Starfire, red Kid Devil, and green Beast Boy and Miss Martian. Of course, both Starfire and Miss Martian are aliens, Beast Boy is a mutant, and Kid Devil was turned into a demon. Beast Boy was born a normal skin tone but turned green in his origin story.
    • Watchmen features the blue Doctor Manhattan.
    • In a rare exception to the "only white people are multicolored" rule, Wonder Woman once dated the Hindu avatar Rama for a while, who is very blue.
    • Wonder Woman (1942): The Green Geni are alien men who look entirely human save for their green skin.
    • Superman:
      • In the storyline Crucible, Lys Amata's skin is pink-colored. In contrast, her students Tsavo and Maxima are blue-furred and red-skinned, respectively. Among the villains, Roho's hair is a darker shade of blue than his brother's, and Rendll is orange-skinned.
      • Phantom Zone criminal Nam-Ek gained a purple leathery skin (and a horn sprouting from his forehead) following an experiment Gone Horribly Right.
      • In Supergirl story The Condemned Legionnaires, the race of giant aliens seen in the Puppet Planetoid are blue-skinned.
    • Originally, Harley Quinn had a normal skin color, painting her face white whenever she's in costume. Since the New 52, however, her skin is completely white due to her origin being revised to have her fall into a vat of chemicals just like the Joker. To pass as a normal person, she has to apply makeup all over her body.
    • Once famously used to discuss racial matters in Green Lantern/Green Arrow, where an elderly black man gives Hal a What the Hell, Hero?, saying that "I been readin' about you, how you work for the blue skins and how on a planet someplace you helped out the orange skins and you done considerable work for the purple skins! Only there's skins you never bothered with — the black skins!"
      • And then, some years later, reversed (in a fairly light-hearted way) when a bunch of purple- and orange-skinned aliens visit Earth to complain that GL is neglecting the rest of his space sector to look after Earth; they use the same words with the colors swapped. Poor Hal just looks to the sky in frustration.
  • In The Shadow Hero, Hank Chu aka the Green Turtle has skin that turns inhumanly bright pink when exposed to water, due to his mother exposing him to toxic waste because she thought it would give him superpowers.
  • Sin City has Ethan Roark Junior, a.k.a. That Yellow Bastard. He's the son of Sin City's de facto ruler who enjoys raping and killing pre-pubescent girls. He gained that nickname due to his bright yellow skin, which he developed as a side-effect of experimental medical procedures that regenerated his genitals and right hand after Detective John Hartigan shot them off.
  • The Smurfs all have natural blue skin, but there are several instances where Smurfs get other unusual skin color by different means.
    • The first story is about a bug called the "Bzz Fly" that turns Smurfs into a zombie equivalent by stinging them which also gives them pitch black skin. In some translations as well as the animated adaptation, it's changed to purple skin.
    • In a story where the Smurfs find a wish-granting egg, three Smurfs ask to have red, yellow and green and purple striped skin. There's also a Smurf that wishes for an other Smurf to have pale green skin.
    • In a story, Gargamel feeds a poison to almost every Smurf in the village which gives them different deformities. For some of them, this includes different skin colors.
  • Tintin: In Tintin: Land of Black Gold, Thomson and Thompson accidentally ingest a poison which, among other effects, causes their skin and hair to wildly change color.
  • The anthropomorphic animal characters of Tooth and Claw represent all the colorful diversity of real life animals.

    Fan Works 
Doug Dungeons & Dragons
  • Vow of Nudity: Kay'la (as a sea elf) has blue skin, white hair and bright purple eyes.
The Legend of Zelda
  • Divorced explains Ganondorf's green skin as being a Gerudo trait. Male Gerudo always have green-ish brown skin.
My Little Pony: Equestria Girls
  • Oversaturated World: Justified by the existence of chromelanin, a form of melanin that apparently reacts to background magic by reflecting and absorbing specific wavelengths of light. Supplementary materials reveal that the changeling equivalents have learned how to manipulate their chromelanin, allowing them to change skin and hair color, and go so far as to explain Applejack's unusually pale skin tone (read: Caucasian) as the result of her using soap with a specific chemical when she was younger that washed the chromelanin out.
  • Sunset's Recovery Arc: Humans come in technicolor skin-tones. They don't have clear cut ethnicities and skin-tones like real humans, but stereotypes do exist depending on the darkness of your skin. For example, Sunset jokes about "light-skinned kids" who can withstand the cold no matter what (referencing a stereotype about white people being able to withstand being Exposed to the Elements).
My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic
  • Book Of Days: In the source work, ponies' coats have unexplained technicolor variation, but in "Hoofnote [4]" of Part 16 of this fanfic gives a justification. More than a millennium before, ponies had a restricted coat color variation matching real-life ponies', until Discord altered them:
    in those days ponies' coats generally came shades of grey, brown, russet, and beige, often with spots and dapples. The truth, they told me, was that the multicolored hues common today were magically imposed on the pony populace by Discord during the era of his misrule.
Punch-Out!!
  • Near the end of Ma Fille, Bear Hugger adopts a forest elf named Raine as his son. Raine looks human, except for having blue skin, blue hair, and pointy ears.
The Simpsons Super Mario Bros.
  • Remember: Blumiere comments on his dark blue skin, wondering if he was human and had the pale skin of the neighboring townspeople.
Thunder Cats 2011
  • The Evabon Saga: Evabon come in a variety of colours such as red, green and yellow but all of our lead Evabon are grey skinned.
Crossovers

    Films — Animation 
  • Aladdin: Genie is a bright shade of blue. Justified since he's a magical genie.
  • Cleopatra: Julius Caesar has green skin, which is never explained.
  • Coraline: In The Film of the Book, Mr. Bobinsky is blue, which is left pretty much unexplainednote .
  • Corpse Bride: All the characters from the Land of the Living are dull gray, whereas everyone in the Land of the Dead (the ones who still have skin, at least) is various shades of blue.
  • The Little Mermaid (1989): Ursula is light purple, with no explanation given. In the sequel, her sister Morgana is green.
  • The Emperor's New Groove: In a similar case to Ursula, Yzma stands out as the one cast member who has light purple skin with no explanation given. It may be a side effect of her old age though, since the spin-off TV series shows her when she was young and reveals that she had brown skin originally.
  • Dreadfully Titled Movie has dozens upon dozens of fantasy races in it and almost all of them come with unrealistic skin tones, like navy blue or few shades of green. Meanwhile, the evil Black Knights tormenting the land have pitch-black skin.
  • The people of Gandahar have varying shades of blue skin, while the Deformed have grey skin.
  • Sleeping Beauty: Maleficent has unusually light green skin and yellow eyes.
  • Half of the cast of the My Little Pony: Equestria Girls series have skin that retains the color of their coat in pony form, presumably to avoid making the characters human ethnicities and opening a can of worms. (They almost avoided doing so, but many wished they'd taken the plunge, and the fact that pretty much everyone has had their color scheme significantly lightened has not gone unnoticed.)
  • The Thief and the Cobbler has a totally unexplained case of this trope applied to the whole population of the Golden City. The most striking example is Zigzag the Evil Vizier, whose skin is light blue (and who has, additionally, six Creepy Long Fingers on each hand); however, most of the background characters are of less conspicuous, but still unnatural colors (light grey, light yellow, bright pink); the Palace eunuchs, at first sight, seem to be black (and in the executive-meddled Miramax cut, they are), but they are actually dark purplenote .
  • Wendell & Wild: The titular characters Wendell and Wild, as well as their father Buffalo Belzar, are purple skinned demons.
  • In The Willoughbys, Ruth is hot pink, while her adoptive father Melanoff is a deep magenta. Strangely, Melanoff is depicted with ordinary brown skin in the in-universe advertisements and pictures depicting him, but the character himself has unmistakably pink-purple skin.
  • Yellow Submarine: of the Pepperlanders, Old Fred has brown skin. The Blue Meanies are mainly shades of blue but they are adorned with different colors as well.

    Films — Live-Action 
  • Guardians of the Galaxy (2014) has plenty of blue, green, yellow (not just Asiatic, but yellow) and even fuchsia skin to go around in the Nova Empire. In fact, Rubber-Forehead Aliens seem to be the most dominant form of nonhuman life, suggesting that this movie's universe is more humanoid-dominated than even that of Star Wars. Notably, the three main villains of the first film, Ronan, Yondu and Nebula, are all blue aliens of different species.
  • The Hunger Games: The people of the Capitol, especially compared to the drab tones shown in the Districts. Justified as outrageous makeup and/or cosmetic procedures is fashionable there.
  • Common with aliens in Star Wars, but some particularly notable examples are:
    • Twi'leks, whose women are the setting's main Green Skinned Space Babes, look mostly human but for having a pair of fleshy organs descending from the backs of their heads, and come in every color of the rainbow but particularly blue and green. Red Twi'leks, called "Lethans", are said to be a result of a rare genetic mutation.
    • Zeltrons are noted for typically having pink to red skin and blue hair.
    • Chiss, whose most famous representative is Grand Admiral Mitth'raw'nuruodo, have blue skin and hair and glowing red eyes.
    • Duros like Cad Bane physically resemble The Greys, with blue to gray skin and large red eyes. Neimoidians, a rival ethnic group of the same species, range from gray to green in skin color.
    • Mirialans seen in the film are shown to be green-skinned. Legends claimed they can also be yellow or more human-like skin tones. Star Wars Resistance, on the other hand, showed that they come in purple, too.
  • The Oompa-Loompas in Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory have orange skin and green hair.
  • The Wicked Witch of the West in The Wizard of Oz is green. It's unknown what color her sister was but the only other witch, Glinda the Good Witch, has a normal skin tone.
  • X-Men Film Series: Mystique, Nightcrawler, Beast, and Apocalypse are different shades of blue. Azazel and a Horseman in Ancient Egypt who kills two traitors by ripping the flesh from their bodies are red. Toad's skin has a greenish hue.

    Literature 
  • Books of the Raksura: The general population includes a huge variety of humanoid variants. Green, blue, gold, or grey skin is accepted as a matter of course, since you're just as likely to see people with scales, fur, or feathers.
  • The human inhabitants of the Moon in The Darkangel Trilogy can have white (not pale beige), black (not dark brown), copper, amber, blue, green, teal, or purple (possibly two different shades of that last, no less) skin. They were almost certainly deliberately engineered for it.
  • In Chrysalis (Beaver Fur), the human-minded robots the Terran created for their army have recolonized the Earth and built themselves hairless android bodies with Barbie Doll Anatomy. A popular way these androids adorn themselves, in lieu of hairstyles or clothing, is by changing the color of their normally white, shiny plastic skin to various patterns. One is shown with patches of her skin glowing blue in a blinking pattern.
  • Destined to Lead: The feas come in every single colour imaginable.
  • Domina: Simon has purple skin, while his sister has jet black. Probably just another cosmo; no one bats an eye at it.
  • The Duel of Sorcery Trilogy: Serroi has green skin, which is very unusual and marks her as an obvious mutant.
  • Fengshen Yanyi: some characters have highly unusual skin colors, implied to be caused by their training in Taoist arts under immortals. Notable one include Chong Heihu "The Black Tiger" (whose face is dark "as the bottom of a cauldron", coupled with red beard and white eyebrows), Zheng Lun (indigo face with golden needle-like hair), Leizhenzhi (blue skin and red hair), Li Gen the Yaksha (indigo skin and sand-colored hair), the five Road Spirits tamed by Ziya (one is black, one is blue, one red, one white and the last one yellow) and many more.
  • The Five People You Meet in Heaven: The carnival freak has blue skin (from mercury poisoning).
  • Forward the Foundation: A (human) judge has faint blue skin — the color gets more pronounced when she's angry.
  • The Goblin Emperor: Inverted with an Amazing Grayscale Population. Elves are white (not peach or beige), goblins are black (not dark brown), and characters with mixed ancestry, such as the protagonist, are various shades of gray.
  • The Great SF Stories: The cover to Isaac Asimov Presents: The Golden Years of Science Fiction: Fourth Series has a bald gold-skinned humanoid alien climbing along a cliff.
  • Guardian Cats and the Lost Books of Alexandria: Justified as being due to differences in vision between species. Cats don't see humans in shades of beige and brown, they see human in shades of blues and greens.
  • Hothouse: The future humans have green skin.
  • The Hunger Games: The Capitol's inhabitants are stated to have ridiculous and freakish fashions, including body dyes. At least one person mentioned has dyed her whole body pea green.
  • The Iron Teeth web serial's goblins have many different colors of skin. Most are green, but sometimes a goblin with a unique skin color is born. For example, the goblin who helped Blacknail find water has a blue cast to his skin. Others are grey.
  • Larry Niven's Known Space: The "flatlanders" of Earth are a technicolor population, but it's just fashionable skin dye.
  • Steven Erikson's Malazan Book of the Fallen: People of all colors that exist on Earth, plus blue. (Which is mentioned very offhandedly and thus is very puzzling at first.)
  • The Mer: After a person turns into a Mer, their skin changes color to something that's usually totally different from their original color. Val is lavender, Shona is green, Will is blue, and Liam is red.
  • In Midnight's Children, a holy man suggests that Jesus would have had sky blue skin so as not to be of any specific ethnicity.
  • In Monster by A. Lee Martinez, thanks to a survived basilisk bite, the titular character wakes up with a different skin color every day, accompanied by a random magical power. He keeps a notebook to track the powers that come with each color — up until he gains a measure of control over this condition with the aid of the story's MacGuffin.
  • Mr. Men: The Mr. Men and Little Misses have a variety of colors. The same thing occurs in The Mr. Men Show, and applies to hair as well.
  • Once: Several undines have complexions tinged respectively with blue and green.
  • Spectral Shadows has animal characters that are all sorts of different colors.
  • Star Wars Legends has a number of humanlike aliens and "near-humans" who are brightly colored. Most are explained as being normal humans in the far past who got separated onto different planets. Different living conditions and thousands of years' worth of microevolution resulted in people with blue and pink skin. For instance, Twi'leks come in all colors of the rainbow.
  • Strata: The heroine is able to change her skin color at will when she feels like it; two examples are silver and jet black.
  • Third Time Lucky: And Other Stories of the Most Powerful Wizard in the World: Demons have bright skins in different colors. Kali, Magdelene's housekeeper, is green.
  • In This Immortal, the Vegans are blue-skinned Humanoid Aliens able to live and breathe on Earth.
  • The Uglies series hints at this in Diego. It's made clear that more "Extreme" fashions aren't allowed in New Pretty Town but in Diego anything seems to go.
  • Vorkosigan Saga: The Jewels in Captain Vorpatril's Alliance are six (genetically engineered) siblings with six different skin colors — blue, white (snow-white, not pale-skin-tone white), yellow, green, red, and black (ink-black, not dark-skin-tone black).
  • A Voyage to Arcturus: The inhabitants of Tormance have many different possible skin tones, some of which don't exist in our spectrum.
  • The Wicked Years: Quadlings have red skin. This is different from the original Oz books, where they only paint their skin red.
  • Xanth: The "Colored People" started out as blacks accidentally immigrating from our world circa the Civil Rights Movement, and due to the rule of pun in Xanth, their kids ended up with having skin tones of pretty much every color under the sun.
  • Zachary Nixon Johnson: There are some genetically modified humans with unnatural skin colors. The Thompson Quads, for instance, have purple-tinted skin.

    Live-Action TV 
  • In Alter Ego (2021), most of the alter egos have bright, colorful skin.
  • Angel: Lorne has green skin with red horns. He is from another dimension.
  • Castelo Rá-Tim-Bum:
    • Caipora has red skin.
    • It's not clear if Etevaldo wears yellow and pink clothes or if that's the color of his skin. Either way, his face has the same colors. His hands are blue, just like his head protuberances.
    • Morgana has pale white skin.
    • Zula is a blue girl.
  • Danger 5: In Episode 4 of the miniseries, Göring shows off several women enhanced in a similar fashion to Hitler's Carbonado bodyguards, but using different gemstones. None of them are quite as bulletproof.
  • The Dark Crystal: Age of Resistance: Unlike other Grottan Gelflings, Deet's skin is a light shade of green.
  • The Doodlebops, a Canadian children's TV show. The main cast, who form a band, are all brightly colored. The reason for this was to make them look like real life cartoon characters.
  • Farscape has quite a few technicolour aliens, with those in the main cast doubling as Technicolour Space Babes. There's priestess Zhaan, whose bright blue skin has a marble effect to it. This is particularly noticeable with her being bald. There's also Chiana, whose skin and hair are pale grey, with darker highlights in particular places — like her collarbone and cheekbones. Sikozu perhaps also counts, though her skin is mostly peachy-cream, there are scale-textured red-gold patches to match her bright red hair.
  • Love and Destiny: Shi San had blue skin before taking a human form.
  • Once Upon a Time: Zelena the Wicked Witch of the West has green skin, in the tradition of the MGM film, though not in Storybrooke. Turns out her intense jealousy towards Regina and Dorothy caused her skin to literally turn green with envy. In "Heartless", her neck is shown briefly turning green again when the Evil Queen chooses Mr. Gold over her.
  • Star Trek gave us blue Andorians, Benzites and Bolians, Green Skinned Space Babes from Orion, and orange Talaxians with polka dots. Most other races just have whatever colorations Earthlings have, since make-up isn't free. Thus, Vulcans and Romulans can be black, white, or Asian. In TOS, Klingons lacked their forehead ridges and their main characteristic was somewhat darker skin (accomplished by slathering varying shades of makeup that resembled shoe polish on white actors). After the films, the forehead ridges became Klingon's most identifiable characteristic, and most Klingons were played without the actor's skin pigment being changed, though most Klingons were played by black actors starting with TNG. The redesigned Klingons in Star Trek: Discovery range in color from coal black to chalky white.
  • The Keepers from Through the Dragon's Eye are all a singular color- skin, hair and clothes. Stern leader Doris is purple, jovial and athletic Boris is orange, and pet owner Morris is green.

    Magazines 

    Music 
  • The Blue Man Group.
  • From "Rapper's Delight":
    ''... and I like to say hello to the black, to the white, the red and the brown, the purple and yellow ..."
  • Nobody seems to make much of it within the canon materials, but Gorillaz bassist Murdoc is green. Some early pictures depict him with what could be a normal olive skin tone, but he slowly went through yellowish-green to his current dark green. This might be something to do with his unhealthy lifestyle (drug and alcohol abuse and a long period of living next to a disease-and-zombie-infested landfill). Wild Mass Guessing has also suggested it might be a sign that he has demon blood. Apparently, Murdoc has some serious problems with personal hygiene, but it's highly improbable that just this would make his skin so green.

    Myths & Religion 
  • In Beti-Pahuin Mythology, everything and everyone in the land of the Blue Tribe is blue.
  • In Egyptian Mythology, Osiris is often depicted as green, which is apropos given he's technically undead.
  • In Hindu Mythology, some gods are often depicted with such skin tones. The most iconic case is Vishnu, who's blue. Three of his avatars (Rama, Krishna, and Kalki) are also commonly depicted as having blue skin.

    Pinballs 
  • A rare Real Life example occurs in Stern's Ali pinball, where boxer Muhammad Ali is light blue on the playfield.
  • The other alien patrons in Big Bang Bar have blue, orange, yellow, and green-hued skin tones.
  • In Cirqus Voltaire, the Ringmaster has a bright green face, while some of the performers have uncharacteristically bright yellow and orange skin tones.
  • Nearly everyone in Magic Girl is light green, purple, or orange.
  • In Spectrum, most of the people featured have either light green skin or green-tinted skin tones.

    Podcasts 
  • In Sequinox, the stars all have brightly-colored skin in shades like pink, yellow, and orange.

    Puppet Shows 
  • The puppet characters from Allegra's Window. Naturally, Jim Jenkins, who created the show, was also the creator of Doug.
  • Similarly, the "human" puppet characters in Avenue Q are green, blue, and orange.
  • The main characters of The Big Garage are taxi cabs who come in various colors — Yorkie is yellow, Zigzag is purple, London is blue, and Mimi is red. Rusty, a green tow truck, also fits this trope.
  • The Muppets come in all the colors.
  • The Puzzle Place has the Piece Police, a group of multicolored cops who are also The Unintelligible.
  • Sesame Street Muppets are famously multicoloured, be them humanoid or monster.

    Tabletop Games 
  • Dungeons & Dragons:
    • Being inspired by pulp sci-fi, the setting Carcosa features people that come in green, red, blue, purple, yellow, black, brown, orange, transparent, and white, plus jale, dolm, and ulfire in a Shout-Out to A Voyage to Arcturus, and neither black nor brown is negroid, and white is not caucasoid.
    • Starting in second edition, a number of existing humanoid races became more colorful, such as giants and genies who could now be green or blue or what have you. Prior to this, their skin and hair color had just never been mentioned.
    • Justified in 3rd edition with part-human Uneven Hybrids who get their odd coloration from orcs, elves, celestials, fiends, The Fair Folk, Elemental Embodiments, giants, genies, The Undead... you name it, it's got a few phenotypes in the family tree.
  • Exalted: The influence of the Wyld and the Elemental Poles can often lead people to develop unusual skin colors, generally as the next step after weird hair colors; green is especially common in the forests of the East. There are also the Djala, a Human Subspecies marked by bone-white skin with large black spots, and Jade Caste Alchemicals, who come in six different colors to match the shades of "jade" in the setting — green, white, blue, red, black and yellow.
  • Godforsaken: Merfolk skin ranges from all human colours to green, blue and grey.
  • GURPS Thaumatology: Alchemical Baroque: The nomads of the Transgogian Plains have green skins (and sharply pointed ears), but the book emphasises that they are nonetheless fully human; this is an ethnicity marker, not a species difference.
  • Mechanical Dream: Most sapient species tend to come in unsual colors. Gnaths are green, for instance, Inaïs tend to blues, purples and reds, and Nayans are deep blue and become grey and then white as they age.
  • New Horizon has Wafans, Ridiculously Human Robots in any shade you can imagine.
  • In Nomine: In celestial form, Lilim have bright green skin.
  • Pathfinder:
    • Many types of giant manifest unusual skin colors:
      • Cloud giants tend to have milky white, light gray or sky-blue skin.
      • The skin colors of fire giants range from bright scarlet through brick red and deep crimson all the way to soot-black.
      • Frost giants usually have ice-blue skin.
      • The skin of ocean giants is in the colors of the sea, generally ranging from deep blue to pale green.
      • River giants usually have green skin, varying from yellow-green shades to rich jade.
      • While most storm giants have human skin colors, certain sea-faring families have blue or sea-green skin. Further, some storm giants are born with purple skin, which is seen as a sign of good luck.
    • Several deities manifest unusual skin colors.
      • When he was still a mortal, Nethys had purple skin.
      • Nocticula typically appears a woman with purple skin.
      • Among the empyreal lords, Lymnieris has emerald green skin and Sinashakti pale blue.
    • Fey also tend to unusually colorful epidermises.
      • Glaistigs usually have greenish skin.
      • Monaciello gremlins have bright red skin.
      • Pixies have been depicted with both bright blue and off-yellow skin.
    • Shabti have gold, ivory, ebony, or jade skin, depending on what the statue that gave them life was made out of.
    • Nephlei, nymph-like air elementals, have sky-blue skin covered in curving, concentric white markings.
    • People whose body becomes laced with the skymetal siccatite often develop blue skin.
  • Shadowrun: While most metahumans are restricted to real-life skin colors, a few notable exceptions exist:
    • The nartaki, a human metavariant found in India, have red, blue or yellow skin.
    • The Night Ones, a type of European elves, have full-body coverings of short, fine fur that's typically black, violet or blue in color, and more rarely green or dark orange.
    • Oni, a Japanese ork metavariant, have red, orange or blue skin.
  • Talislanta: Many nationalities of pretty-much-human folk have exotic skin colors. Jade, silver, purple, golden or topaz appear in certain minority groups, while greenish or grayish tones are nearly as wide-spread as real-world hues. Among non-humans, the race of Muses can range from rose to turquoise to lavender to pale green, and do so even within the same family. Invoked by the Thralls, who decorate their identical snow-white bodies with unique multicolored tattoos to distinguish themselves from each other.
  • Warhammer 40,000:
    • It generally averts this trope with humans, except for the Salamanders, who have jet black skin due to how their recruiting world is sitting almost right next to their sun. This is more noticeable in the recent edition, as previous editions had them with vaguely African skin tones, while the new ones just slapped on actual black with little regard for highlights.
    • Also played straight by Magnus the Red, Primarch of the Thousand Sons, whose skin is... well, take a guess.
    • The Orks have green skin ("greenskin" is a common slang term for them) and the Tau have blue skin.
    • Tyranids, to a degree, also have this, mainly because they're biologically engineered. Still, one wonders why a hive mind would consider florescent pink with reflective metals to be good for camouflage.
  • World Tree (RPG): While most primes possess the typical colors of their real-life animal counterparts, it's not uncommon for some to sport fur in much more vivid and unusual shades. This is especially prevalent among the Rassimel, among whom pink, purple or metallic-hued fur is far from unknown, and the Sleeth, who are often dark blue or green.

    Toys 
  • Gogo's Crazy Bones characters generally came in various colors, such as red, green, and blue. This causes the Gogos who are made to look like animals resemble Amazing Technicolor Wildlife.
  • Human LEGO minifigures usually have yellow skin. Exceptions: characters from licensed properties retain their normal skin color, and Vitruvius from The LEGO Movie is an African-American. He even lampshades the "face of yellow" part.
  • Similar to the above Gogo's example, Star Monsters consists of characters that can come in four different colors (with the exception of the Shadow family, which are only available in black).
  • Monster High: An overwhelming majority of the characters have odd skin tones, which is justified by the fact that they're all monsters.

    Video Games 
  • In Arc Style: Baseball!! 3D, you can customize the skin of your player characters so it's green or blue.
  • Asana in Atlas Reactor has purple skin as a side-effect of her Super-Soldier conditioning. Mentioning this fact to her face is noted to be the fastest way to get on her bad side.
  • The minor character Yoa in Beyond Good & Evil is blue. It's implied that she's "not a local," though she's still considered "human" to the game's scanner.
  • The Louies (also known as Roois) from Bomberman come in all sorts of colors, with each one having a different ability. Power Bomberman takes this even further, by having more than twice as many as in the canon games.
  • Boxxy Quest: The party member, "Anonymous", who has green skin:
  • City of Heroes allows you to create characters with skin in any of thirty shades spread across the rainbow or ten monochromatic shades from white to black in addition to a wide range of 'normal' skin shades. The NPC characters use this to a greater or lesser extent; for example, in the Outcasts NPC villain group, characters with ice powers have pale-blue skin, characters with fire powers have red skin, and characters with stone powers have grey-brown skin. The members of the Trolls NPC villain group all have skin that is a light green, a side effect of their use of the drug Superadine.
  • Ash, the Player Character of Dawn, has green skin.
  • The Raydians from de Blob come in all sorts of bright colors. The eponymous protagonist can change his color at will to seven different colors including clear using Paintbots. The Inkies are all monochromatic colors of black and white.
  • Inverted in The Dishwasher - everyone has completely white skin, regardless of actual race. The Chef is, according to the creator, quite black, but appears just as ashen as everyone else.
  • The Double Dragon arcade games have technicolor palette swaps of the enemies in later areas, such as the green Abobo (probably an intentional reference to the Hulk) and blue Burnov.
  • Dragon Quest V: The Winter Queen has grey skin to differentiate her from ordinary Blizzibody enemies.
  • In a world where every car has a different paint job, the Putt-Putt series is bound to play this straight. It gets even better when you find you can change his color. It always starts out purple.
  • EarthBound (1994):
    • The overworld-sprites of human enemies are a blue-skinned color-swap of their benevolent versions.
    • Also, the battle-sprite of the Cranky Lady has purple skin, while her overworld-sprite is as blue as the others. The stronger version, the Extra Cranky Lady, has the same overworld-sprite, but a tanned battle-sprite.
  • The Elder Scrolls:
    • Played straight for the races of Mer (Elves).
      • The Aldmer (First Elves or "Elder Folk" in the language of the Elves), the Precursors from which all modern races of Mer descend, had golden skin. The Altmer (High Elves or "Cultured Folk") are their closest living relatives and share this trait.
      • The Dunmer (Dark Elves or "Dark Folk") have ashen-gray skin and blood red eyes. They were formerly the Chimer (Changed Elves, "Changed Folk" and/or "People of the North"), who had a darker golden skin than their Aldmer ancestors, but were transformed into the modern Dunmer as the result of a curse.
      • The Bosmer (Wood Elves or "Tree-Sap People") have darker tones of skin, ranging from the shade of a tanned to human to darker shades of red and brown. They have skin tones closest to those of humans, which is fitting given that they are said to have diverged from the Aldmer after settling in Valenwood and taking "Mannish Wives," meaning they have some human ancestry in their background.
      • The Orsimer ("Pariah Folk", most commonly known as Orcs) have green skin. The first Orcs were created when the Daedric Prince Boethiah devoured and later excreted the Aldmeri spirit Trinimac. Trinimac's remains became the Daedric Prince Malacath, while his Aldmeri followers were transformed into the Orcs.
      • The ancient Falmer (Snow Elves) had pure white skin. They were later twisted into the modern Falmer, blind and feral goblin-esque creatures who live underground. They retain the white skin trait.
      • The ancient Dwemer (Deep Elves, also known as dwarves) had pasty pale skin, likely as a result of their preferred living places.
      • The Maormer (Sea Elves) who live on the tropical continent of Pyandonea far to the south of Tamriel, have "chameleon" skin. It is said that they can "disappear by walking into the shade of a single tree."
    • Many of Tamriel's other (typically more primitive) races have unusual skin tones as well. Giants have gray skin. Goblins have green skin. Rieklings have blue skin. Ogres have grayish-blue skin.
    • The Kothringi, a primitive tribe of Men native to the Black Marsh who are presumed extinct after being ravaged by the Knahaten Flu in the 2nd Era, had silver skin. This is unusual among Tamriel's other races of Men (Imperials, Nords, Bretons, and Redguards), who all have skin tones in the range of real-life humans.
  • Elemental — War of Magic - your sovereign can pick any skin color, whether or not you're one of the dragon-hybrid guys.
  • The Seedlings in Ever Oasis are a race of humanoid-looking Plant People. Though the box art would have you believe they mostly have humanoid skin tones, they come in a wide range of bright colors like blue and green, and only some of them have brown and beige skin like humans do.
  • EXTRAPOWER: In general, humans are usually naturally hued, with most of the uniquely coloured people being Green-Skinned Space Babe or otherwise magical in some ways. And then you have otherwise normal humans who are golden in colour, or a sinister light purple, and their designs are never commented on and are taken for granted.
  • Fate/Grand Order:
    • Spartacus has completely grey skin for no apparent reason.
    • Most of the Hassans, namely Cursed Arm and Hundred Personas, have dark grey skin. This is very odd when compared to Hassan of Serenity, who has a normal brown expected of someone of Middle East origin.
    • Karna has two skin tones - pitch black and snow white. Not only both shades are impossible to occur to humans, several official Fate Series artists think the black suit is actually Sensual Spandex (as seen in the animated adaptation of Fate/Apocrypha). In addition, his Bio-Armor also gives his skin golden Tron Lines, and then his Santa version adds some odd red fracture-like marks along his left arm on the whole ensemble. Dark red. Yes, the guy can have up to four non-natural skin tones at once.
    • A typical trait of the Foreigner Class. As they are human hosts of the Cthulhu Mythos Eldritch Abominations, in later ascensions their previously normal skin tones become unnatural - Abigail becomes paper white, Molay is dark grey, Van Gogh becomes blue, and then also completely white... mind you the oter changes are far far more extreme.
    • Arjuna Alter starts with a strange grey skin shade before his ascensions restore him to his normal Indian brown. Funnily enough, the grey skin tone is the result of what happens if you take regular Arjuna's complexion and put it in a black and white filter.
    • Avenger Kama, when fought as a boss in her debut event, has dark blue skin, which is rather typical of Hindu deities.
  • Final Fantasy XIV have normal skin tones for most of the player character races, but certain races can have more outlandish skin colors like teal, dark blue, snow white, or even red.
  • In Fire Emblem Gaiden and its remake, Shadows of Valentia, almost all of the Duma Faithful have either blue or purple skin. It's implied to be due to them making frequent deals with Duma for more power.
  • Friday Night Funkin':
    • Girlfriend's parents both have lavender skin. Girlfriend herself can also turn purple when using her demonic powers.
    • The background dancers and limo driver in Week 4 are a light shade of pink.
  • Friday Night Funkin' Minus: Since every character is based on their icon, it leads to things such as Girlfriend being crimson, Beta Boyfriend being yellow, Blue Boyfriend being...well, blue, Mommy Mearest being pink, etc.
  • In Gacha Life, you can color your character's skin red, blue, whatever!
  • Geneforge. In the earlier games, only spellcasters had funny skin colors, but more recently, anyone could be blue, green, or hot pink.
  • Ghost Trick has many sorta normal-looking people with Anime Hair, but there's also the foreigners that are all blue. They never point it out, just that they're foreign.
  • Dr. Bolt from Gizmo has purple skin for some reason.
  • The Fire Clan of Golden Sun have some spectacular skin colors. Among the major antagonists, Saturos is blue, Agatio is green, Karst is pink, and Menardi is white except for her ears, which are dark red. They also appear not to be entirely human, since they have scales, Pointy Ears, Facial Markings, and equally bizarre hair colors. It's never really in-game mentioned beyond "kind of strange-looking".
    • The Beastmen of Morgal in Dark Dawn also tend to get pretty outrageous fur colors, especially since they're supposed to be... well, animal-people. The band alone contains a bubblegum-pink Cat Girl, a teal green fox, and a dark blue wolf. The king of Morgal is also blue-furred and has brown hair. Rather disconcerting. After the firing of the Apollo Lens, everyone left in Morgal apparently has gold fur now, bar Sveta who wasn't there during the firing.
    • Also in Dark Dawn, Blados of Tuaparang has blue-white skin. He was initially assumed by fans to be from Prox, but lacks the pointy ears and scales (and, you know, is from Tuaparang). Another character from his hometown looks entirely human aside from having Anime Hair and horns, so again, "not entirely human" might be the cause.
  • Grow:
    • The Onkies can be of various colors. Usually, it depends on the gender and the age, but in some games, their colors represent their specialities.
    • Tonties also have various colors that tell their roles.
  • Guitar Hero World Tour's character creation mode allows the full spectrum of color to be used for hair, beard - and skin.
  • HeroSmash has Yergan, a character with yellow skin.
  • The characters on games from It's My Life (PBS) have skin tones such as purple and green.
  • In Jak and Daxter: The Precursor Legacy, the Sages' skin colors correspond with the type of eco they're the Sage of. So Samos Hagai, sage of green eco, has green skin, the Blue Sage is blue, and the Red Sage is, unsurprisingly, red.
  • The Discovercraft Crew from Learning Voyage is an interesting example. Most of the family has tan skin, but ZZ has orange. They also have a flying purple alien named Blip.
  • Legacy of Kain: Nosgoth's vampires start off as pretty standard pale, bloodless looking folks, but as they get older they tend to display a large range of color, including bright green (Vorador), yellow-green (Kain), and purple-ish grey (Umah). Then there's Raziel, who while not having skin, has dark-blue muscle tissue for some reason. It's also worth noting that the original Vampire race had light blue skin.
  • The Legend of Zelda:
    • Ganondorf. While the rest of the Gerudo tribe has a natural olive skin tone, Ganondorf himself is olive-skinned in a very literal sense, in that he has a distinct, sickly green hue about him (so did his surrogate mothers, Kotake and Koume). In Twilight Princess, this becomes a deeper, almost forest green color that has no real-world human analogue.
    • The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past: Agahnim is blue in the official artwork, albeit he has a natural skin tone in-game.
  • In Life: the Game, one of the potential dates is a psychopath with green skin.
  • In the Amiga and NES versions of Maniac Mansion, the Edison family all have cyan blue skin, while the rest of the human characters are "flesh" colored. The Edisons have regular Caucasian skin in the sequel Day of the Tentacle.
  • Mass Effect's asari range anywhere from light blue and teal to dark purple, even green, in one case. Salarians run the gamut from red to green to gray to yellow. Krogan are a pale yellow, the hanar are a bio-luminescent pink, and the drell are seen in varying shades of green, blue, and yellow with red "gills". Suffice to say, it's a very colorful galaxy.
    • This is brought up by Shepard when Mordin Solus mentions how humans are the most genetically diverse species of all. Shepard points to all the different colors of other races. Solus brushes him off saying that physical appearance is only one factor in genetic diversity.
  • Moero Chronicle: While every other monster girl has a regular human skin tone, Calypso is blue. The same applies to her Palette Swap Sahagin in the sequel Moero Crystal.
  • The humans in MonsterBag have teal-coloured skin, and turn bright red when agitated.
  • In Mortal Kombat X, Kotal Kahn had the appearance of a blue-skinned humanoid. In Mortal Kombat 11, however, it is revealed that the blue skin is actually a coat of skin paint, complete with the imperfections that would imply. The color is explicitly set aside for the absolute rulers of his people, as he explains.
    Jacqui Briggs: So your skin wasn't always blue...?
    Kotal Kahn: The color is reserved for Osh-Tekk Kahn.
    Jacqui Briggs: Then I hope it washes off, Kotal.
  • In Move or Die, Carla's skin is a strange bluish white color. She's probably supposed to be really pale from not being allowed outside.
  • No Straight Roads: Many character have unconventional skin tones. Our heroes Mayday and Zuke have orange and green skin respectively.
  • Many of the townspeople in the game Nox have fairly normal skin, but due to character customization, you can make the player character any color you want. Of course, no one notices if you happen to be a blue bald man walking around in your underwear...
  • Majority of the cast of Overwatch has normal skin color, but the one justified exception is Widowmaker. She's undergone severe biological modifications, including slowing down her blood circulation, which resulted in her having light purple skin.
  • An interesting case with Grohk, the Lighting Orc from Paladins. While most orcs in fiction are shades of green, Grohk stands out by having vibrant blue skin. However, being blue is the least bizarre thing about Grohk.
  • Pajama Sam has light blue skin, as with most of the other "normal" characters in the series.
  • Peacemaker Series: The dark elves have purple skin in the current continuity. Before the reboot, they had brown skin.
  • Persona 5: Party member Ann Tamaki's Fighting Spirit, who is styled after the fictional Spanish Roma smuggler Carmen, has pink skin.
  • Most humans in Pokémon have normal-looking skin tones, but Xerosic, the leading scientist of Team Flare in Pokémon X and Y, has an unnatural shade of white. The Ultra Recon Squad in Pokémon Ultra Sun and Ultra Moon has pale blue skin, due to hailing from a world where the light was stolen by Necrozma.
  • There's a vendor on Early Poptropica Island (from, you guessd it, Poptropica) that sells skin pigment-changing balloons. Also in 24 Carrot Island, you can get a drink that changes your hair color.
  • Psychonauts features a lot of blue and purple characters. It interestingly averts the "race" clause of this trope. The game features a green Black girl and a bright lavender Spanish man. Chops is a Black Canadian with orange-ish skin and Milla Vodello is a Brazilian whose skin and hair are actually fairly realistic, if a little dark in the skin. Blue skin also tends to mean bad news: Both of the Final Bosses have blue skin, along with the Depraved Dentist Dr. Loboto and local bully Bobby Zilch. Meanwhile, protagonist Raz and his family (who are from Ruritania but are clearly Romani/Romani-inspired) are shades of Simpsons-yellow.
  • In Rakenzarn Tales, green is a surprisingly common skin tone color.
  • Rex Rocket: The skin of Rex, and pretty much everyone else in the game, is yellow.
  • The Zoraï of Ryzom all have blue skin tones. It's rather jarring when the three other races (Trykers, Matis, and Fyros) all have more-or-less natural skin tones.
  • Saints Row: The Third and Saints Row IV have various skin colors and lusters that do not occur naturally. This includes metallic colors, so whenever the mood strikes you can raise hell around Steelport as the T-1000 or an Oscar statuette.
  • In Salt and Sanctuary, characters hailing from Gulchmire have green skin, black sclera, and scales instead of eyebrows. Characters from Jinderen have charcoal skin, red sclera, and small tusks.
  • Sam & Max: Freelance Police:
    • Bosco is described in-game as "light purple", but has an African-American voice. His mother is a more typical "black" medium brown though.
    • Hugh Bliss, who is superficially a Caucasian guy, can change his skin color to colors of the rainbow. He's actually not human at all, but rather a sentient colony of space bacteria.
  • Scribblenauts: You can do this yourself by recoloring human objects, whether with adjectives or from the object editor. It can also be done with potions in Super Scribblenauts and paint-based objects.
  • The Sims:
    • The Sims 2. Every monstrous version of a sim has a different skin color. For example, alien hybrids are green, as are evil witches and plantsims (dark green and pale green with vines), vampires turn a shade pale, zombies become a greenish blue, werewolves are brown. Good witches don't change color, but apparently have glitter embedded into their skin for some reason. Not to mention the endless mods you can download from the 'net which can give you just about any skin color you desire, up to and including rainbow.
    • The Sims 3 abolished the monsters (for now, anyway), but allows you to have exotic skintones right off the bat. In addition to normal skintones, there's also red, blue, and green. Plus, you can adjust it to any shade you wish. You can also set their hair or eye color to anything you wish and it will pass to their children. A man with blonde hair and a woman with black can have a child that has black hair with purple tips.
  • Some, though not all, of the Ram gods in Six Ages are depicted this way. In particular, Orlanth in the game has blue skin, and Ernalda green—very different from their appearances in the game's predecessor, the King of Dragon Pass.
  • Outside of the Silent (whose skin tone is normal for African ancestry) no other humanoid character in Slay the Spire has a human skintone, with most varying from blue to green to gray. Of course nothing says that they're human.
  • Sly Cooper: Many of the characters come in colors that don't occur naturally in their species. Purple seems to be popular, as Muggshot, the Panda King, Dimitri, Neyla, the Guru and Penelope all come in various shades. Then there's Murray and the ape mercenaries, who are pink, and Jean Bison, who's fire-engine red.
  • Thorn of Speed Kills looks completely human, except for his bright blue skin.
  • In Stardew Valley, the player character's skin color can be customized to a wide variety of colors.
  • Starmancer has "Blue Skin" and "Green Skin" traits, which your colonists can have. It's said to be the result of a Brain Uploading error.
  • In Sticky Business, most of the regulars of your sticker shop are humans with unusual skin colors.
  • Canonically, there's Blanka's green skin in Street Fighter, as well as Oro's yellow, Necro's bleach white, Gil's blue and red, Seth's gray and Hakan's tomato red. While Dhalsim and Urien have more mundane dark skin colors, alternate color schemes like to give them all manner of strange, unnatural skin colors.
    • Akuma goes through this trope a lot. Canonically, he's a simple dark-skinned redhead, though alternate color schemes will sometimes give him ashen gray or dark red colors. When he becomes Shin Akuma, his skin also sometimes turns dark red, and as Oni it becomes blue.
  • Suiko Enbu (AKA Outlaws of the Lost Dynasty): Two of the fighters on the roster have abnormal skin colors, those being the blue-skinned Ruan Xiao Wu (Gen Shouji) and gray-skinned Chao Gai. The latter has an explanation as being an undead being, but the former's unusual complexion is left unaddressed, which is odd considering that his brothers have normal skin tones.
  • The NPCs in Tattered World grow more and more colorful until The Shadow Stage, where characters can come in every color of the rainbow.
  • Terraria:
    • The player character can have any possible skin color, picked from a set of options in 1.2 and earlier, and with full hue-saturation-value sliders from 1.3 onwards.
    • The Nymph's true form has green skin. She also either has red patches or is covered in blood.
    • Goblin enemies come in a spectrum from teal to yellow, with the friendly Tinkerer NPC being blue.
    • The Empress of Light is a giant fairy-like being with yellow skin.
  • In Thelast.io, players are randomly assigned a skin color from a wide variety of shades, including varieties of green and purple.
  • In Theta vs Pi 7 this is the case with the patrons of Theta Tavern. It's also true of the Delta Guards. Given the characters are all letters of the Greek alphabet, it would look stranger if they were natural skin tones.
  • Some games in the Tony Hawk's Pro Skater series allow you to use nearly any color possible for the skin of a custom skater, thanks to using full spectrum sliders. Hair can be just as colorful.
  • In Unavowed, Mandana's father, Kalash, has blue skin due to being a full-blooded Jinn. The player even gets the option to point it out.
    Player Character: You're blue.
    Kalash: [completely deadpan] No, I'm Kalash.
  • Undertale: The human child has yellow skin. In the Alternate Universe Deltarune, Kris has yellow skin similar to the human.
  • In Way Walkers University, the Muilan have pale, purplish skin, while the Annarites can range from dark red to black.
  • In Weaponlord, Divada's skin is chalk-white by default, likely to reflect the "ugly" result of her years dabbling in Black Magic. Her 2P color opts for green instead.
  • While customers in We Happy Restaurant start out with normal skin tones, their colors are often the first thing to change as they mutate. There are blue mantises, purple lizards, yellow multi-headed giants, orange Yithians and so on.
    • There is also a green "Elite" version of every customer. They always have bonus effects as long as they are in your restaurant. Depending on the customer type, they may turn red or blue when they mutate.
  • The player character creator of Xenoblade Chronicles X allows for skin tones that are naturally impossible for humans. Justified as the player character's body is a robot "mimeosome", or "Blue Blood" in the Japanese version.
  • In Yume Nikki, the Mall-like world is full of people of many different colors. The character Shitai, aka Dead-Guy-On-The-Pavement, has green skin. This is probably because he's dead and rotting, but a lot of fanart depicts him as a handsome man who just happens to be green.
  • Bob and his zombies in Zombidle have bright green skin that looks more "natural", like an Orc's, then a product of decay. The Succubus has red skin.

    Web Animation 
  • The characters in Chadam range from purple, to blue, to yellow, to...
  • ENA: Ena herself is by default half-blue and half-yellow, split unevenly down the middle. When she's sad, she becomes half-black and half-white. When drunk, she becomes half-green and half-orange. The other residents of her bizarre world are similarly technicolored but less humanoid. Her friend Moony is a completely white moon with a face.
  • Downplayed in Homestar Runner in that, despite the characters running the gamut from "oddly proportioned human" to "technically has a face and walks upright", the most common head color by far is white—as in, literal white. Besides that, there's Bubs (light blue) and Pom Pom (orange). Note that we said "head color", because Long Pants is exaggerated to such an extreme that it's unclear what parts of each character are actually their skin versus their clothes. Coach Z, for example, has a white head but is green from the neck down, and either wearing a bodysuit or nude. Tellingly, he wears his swimsuit on top of whatever it is. Strong Bad, meanwhile, has implied that his bright red boxing gloves are his hands, and gone from implying to outright stating that his bright red wrestling mask is his face, though he has also demonstrated that it can be taken off (the results of which were mercifully blocked by his new high-backed chair) and that the laces can be tightened (which made his brother mistake him for their great-grandmother).
  • LegendaryFrog’s Ark & Kerrigan series stars the green Ark, blue and green Kerrigan, gray Sal, and blue Senya.
  • The (ambiguously) human characters of Monster Lab (2021) all have teal blue skin.
  • Overly Sarcastic Productions usually does this with the gods in its "Miscellaneous Myths" series.
  • Recess Reindeer stars a blue reindeer, a green bug, and a magenta octopus.
  • Spooky Month: All of the human characters have shock white skin.
  • In this cartoon short outlining non-binary gender identities, the traditional binary genders that appear in the beginning are a blue man and a pink woman as per cultural tradition, while the main non-binary character the short focuses on is purple. Towards the end, the character meets other non-binary people — a white one representing people without a gender identity, a half-blue half-pink one representing people with multiple gender identities, a yellow one representing people with a xenogender identity, and one representing genderfluid people that constantly shifts between the preceeding colors.

    Webcomics 
  • In Air Ride Adventures, this is justified since they are Kirbies.
  • Aurora (2019): Humans are for the most part limited to real-life shades, but elementally-adapted populations can possess skin in multiple striking shades. Elves likewise tend to have colorful skin as a baseline trait, most often in sky-like colors such as blues, purples, and pale greys. As a consequence, even background characters have a wide variety of skin tones ranging through the whole color spectrum.
  • In the early days of Bloody Urban, only the vampires and other undead were shown with ridiculous skin colours, but since the switch from black and white to colour, there have been plenty of instances of this trope among the living as well. The most 'realistic' skin colours typically used in the comic are pure white with a pink outline, light olive green and brown.
  • Awful Hospital: Fern and Jay, who are both humans, have green and blue skin, respectively.
  • All races seen so far in Captain Ufo. Green, teal, pink (like, actual pink, not skin tone), yellow, brown, black, gray, there's all sorts.
  • Ctrl+Alt+Del occasionally has the player characters: One (blue), Two (red), Three (yellow) and Four (green).
  • DNA: Species X is mostly covered in grey fur. The parts of the body that are not come in a rainbow of colors that match the colors that they glow when using their powers.
  • Far Star Summer School: Some of the students at Sunny Summer School:
    • Namtara has vibrant yellow skin.
    • Leecha has green skin.
  • Girl Genius:
    • Agatha, Gil, and Tarvek change color every two panels in one of the arcs due to having contracted Hogfarb's Resplendent Immolation, a disease that ultimately causes Spontaneous Human Combustion. The same arc also mentions Vericus Pantelix' Chromatic Death, but that one sounds worse than it is.
    • Jägers can be any color from a "normal" human skin tone to green or purple, and some, like Mamma Gkika, change it at will.
  • Gloomverse: A lot of color-themed magicians have hair and skin in the color they're named after. It's shown with Indigo that clothing they wear actually changes color to match them.
  • In Goblins, the goblins have multiple skin colors, including various shades of green, yellow, orange, brown... even among the same clan (though there are hints that said clan is more cosmopolitan than most). And the Viper clan goblins are all chalk-white.
  • Homestuck: According to Andrew Hussie, he designed the human characters to be "aracial" (meaning not designed to be any particular ethnicity) and the one character with an explicit ethnicity, Hussie's Author Avatar, is an unnatural shade of orange. As a result of this, one mildly popular Fanon is that the pure white shade used for the main human characters is their actual skin tone; they are literally that pale.
  • I'm Not Mad started off with an Amazing Technicolor Population and then abandoned that after its second year (called season in the comic) reboot.
  • The Law of Purple: Caligulan natives sport a rainbow of random skin colors amongst their total population - it's a species trait. So far, this includes blue, green, red, white, pink, yellow, silver, purple, and more.
  • In Lore Olympus, the characters all have bright solid colored skin which also serves as color-coding with the exception of mortals who have regular skin tones (such as Psyche and Semele).
    • Persephone and Hades have pink and blue skin respectfully.
    • The twins, Apollo and Artemis, have purple skin.
    • Minthe has red skin.
  • Aliens as well as humans in Luminary Children have colorful skin, especially Koagi, who's green.
  • Metompsychosis Union: Mag and Freya have blue skin, and several background characters have blue or grey skin as opposed to the more natural human tones of most characters.
  • Sozruquo in The Narts is dark gray, fittingly for someone who is not only Made of Iron but was born from a rock.
  • The stick figure comic Irrelevator has the characters in colors which was excusable until this comic provided an interesting panel.
  • The mermaids from Modest Medusa have a wide range of skin colors, such as blue, pruple, yellow, red, and pink.
  • All characters from Monsterful. We have blue, gray, green, pure white, scaley reptilian, even textured skin and more. Justified, since they are all monsters living in a monster-only world.
  • My Impossible Soulmate: Among Room P-1's students, Verity has blue skin and Belial has pink skin.
  • The Odd Show: Many characters in the series such as the stickpeople have different colors.
  • One strip of NSFW fantasy comic Oglaf shows a Land of Indulgence where the population is this trope.
  • Justified in Olympus Overdrive. The gods' forms are dictated by the answers a contestant fills out on a questionnaire. Their favorite color is the color of the god's skin will be. The human partners all have normal skin tones.
  • Most of the cast from "Restaurante Macoatl'' come in multiple colors, but humans tend to come in the traditional browns and pink.
  • Schlock Mercenary has an engineered offshoot of humanity called "Purps", whose purple skin performs a type of photosysnthesis, greatly reducing their need to eat. And probably necessitating a change in police terminology.
  • Star Impact: As of the beginning of Chapter 4, Aster and Teddy have dark blue skin while everyone else's skin is porcelain-white. The comic used to be depicted in full color with characters having realistic skin tones, but creator Jack McGee made the shift to a limited-color style out of not wanting to go nuts working on the comic while maintaining a biweekly upload schedule.
  • The MS Paint Adventures fancomic Superego gives each of the main characters a color, with both their physical appearance and their dialogue in that color.
  • The background characters in Supernormal Step are far more colorful than the main cast, and that's really saying something.
  • Temerity has many brightly colored aliens, including NAIA, one of the two leads.
  • Thinking Too Much to Think Positively: A very downplayed example applying only to one character - Xan herself. She deliberately draws herself with literal white skin - while all other white humans have realistic flesh tones - to represent how she sees herself as a work in progress. To add to this, in the first part of "Dial D for Dysphoria", the colour literally disappears from Xan when she experiences gender dysphoria for the first time.
  • Tower of God: Many races have peculiar colors, for instance the blueish-skinned race of Lurker or Anaak who is green.
  • Unsounded: Waterwomen come in various shades of blue, green and grey.
  • Waterworks:
    • The gang of Blue Boys is composed of, you guessed it, four blue individuals. Except for Slick, who is only wearing a blue suit. (Curiously, we see two of the thugs in a flashback and they're white back then, like all other people in the comic.) The protagonist lampshades it at one point.
      Connie: So, why are you guys all blue?
      Slick: THAT'S RACIST!
    • Later in the interlude, the aforementioned gang fights a team of green-colored individuals with various abilities and quirks.
  • In Yokoka's Quest, while many demons have skin tones within human ranges, a lot of them do not. Kalliv is green, Hurricane is greyish purple, and some background characters have even more vivid colours including yellow and purple. Their even more colourful body markings, Facial Markings, and hair further adds to this.
  • Zoophobia has humanoid characters with pale green, white, blue and gray skin. And that's just the humanoid characters.

    Web Originals 
  • The species of Aegeroth: A Checkered History range from a sickly green skin tone to bright white.
  • The Crew of the Copper-Colored Cupids features a variety of Humanoid Aliens with strangely-coloured skin. The Queen of the Black Market is "a slightly wrong shade of pink", Madame Tarsa has bubblegum-pink skin with purple hair, Sneernobiel has light blue skin, and one illustration depicted Alexander Neezley with bluish-white skin.
  • As Floating Point takes place Inside a Computer System populated by A.I., the living Programs have a rainbow array of skin tones. This should result in no bias, but one character deliberately changes his skin to a neutral grey to avoid any preconceived notions about his background or temperament.
  • An increasingly common feature of characters created by the Furry Fandom.
  • Looming Gaia: The many peoples of Looming Gaia come in many colors. For example, roshava are red or blue depending on their sex, trolls are green, and male cecaelia are blue or green while females are purple, red or yellow.
  • In the MediaGlyphs Project, a bias-free pictorial language based on Chinese grammar, the genderless human figures appear in blue, green, orange, and purple.
  • Obscured Eyes: Various characters have skin tones that would be considered unnatural in real life. For example, Beatrice has ash grey skin, Dolly Duncan has pink skin, and Mother Mary has pure white skin.
  • In Taerel Setting, kin'toni can have all kinds of odd skin tones. The Clael Kin'toni Clan have green skin, the Peullton Kin'toni Clan have dark blue skin, the Ranther kin'toni have brown-green skin, and the Invernus kin'toni have light silver skin. Really, most of prolific site writer "I Am The Skull"'s clans have odd skin colours.
  • Welcome Home (Clown Illustrations): Wally is yellow, Eddie is orange-yellow, and Frank is gray. Downplayed with Julie, who's pink, but a shade that isn't that off from a human flesh tone.

    Web Videos 
  • The three main characters of Don't Hug Me I'm Scared are bright shades of yellow, red, and green. They change to green, blue, and red, their favorite colors respectively, at the end of episode six as a "Groundhog Day" Loop begins.
  • Unlike the source material, the Doug Fan Film Doug Funnie in Adult Life averts this. All of the characters shown have normal skin tones, even Roger and Skeeter.
  • Petscop: Character colours in the game range from green, to white, to grey, to red, to yellow, to pink.
  • The example with Doug is parodied in a deleted scene of Smosh's "If Cartoons Were Real." In said deleted scene, Doug freaks out upon seeing that Skeeter has blue skin.
    Doug: WHY THE FUCK ARE YOU BLUE?!

    Real Life 
  • Ingesting certain silver-containing compounds causes argyria (silver poisoning, in short), the symptoms of which include one's skin turning blue. Certain other unhealthful conditions can cause red, yellow, or orange skin.
    • Ingesting sodium nitrate (saltpetre) can also turn the skin blue, as reported by epidemiologist Berton Roueche in "Eleven Blue Men".
    • A particular enzyme deficiency can also cause blue skin. Read the Straight Dope on the Blue Fugates of Kentucky, who have literal blue skin due to a genetic condition where they have high levels of methemoglobin. The father and four of the seven children he had with his normal-complexioned wife all have it, while the others do not. Besides them, the condition is very rare due to being a recessive gene..
    • On a related note, prolonged contact with copper will turn your skin green. It's not a myth or something made up for that episode where the main characters get scammed on their class rings, it really happens and it's the primary reason why you won't see many copper ring bands, earring hooks, or anything else that stays tight to the skin.
    • Stan Jones, who unsuccessfully ran for Senate as a Libertarian, consumed home-made colloidal silver out of fear of Y2K problems, causing his skin to permanently become a blue-gray color.
    • Chrysiasis (gold poisoning) does the exact same thing as argyria where the skin turns blue-gray.
  • Exposure to TNT turns skin yellow. Ammunition factory workers in World War One were known as Canary Girls for this reason.
  • Eating nothing but carrots for an extended period of time will turn your skin orange, most obviously your palms and the bottoms of your feet. The effect will wear off once you change your diet. This is because of beta-carotene, which naturally occurs in carrots and some other red, yellow, or orange fruit and vegetables, and is sometimes used as a yellow/orange food coloring, such as in the drink Sunny Delight (Sunny D). There have been reports of children turning orange because they drank Sunny Delight in excessive quantities. Beta-carotene is normally transformed in the body to create Vitamin A, but since Vitamin A is poisonous in excessive amounts, excessive quantities of beta-carotene are disposed of by dumping them into the skin.
  • Jaundice, a symptom often associated with sickle-cell anemia and malaria, gives the skin a nasty, lemony-yellow color. It’s often joked that yellow cartoon humans, such as The Simpsons, have it.
  • Albinism, which is caused by a melanin deficiency that results in incredibly pale skin, hair, and eyes.
  • Full-Body tattoos.
  • In a fascinating and extremely rare genetic disorder, certain biracial children have been born with a "stripe" down the middle of their bodies (particularly their stomachs)- a dividing line between the dark and the light skin. Chimerism is more common in certain animals. Tortoiseshell cats have two lines of skin cells covering different parts of the body.
  • Some fake tanning products don't quite get the colour right and dye your skin orange instead, creating an uncanny resemblance to the Oompa-Loompas mentioned in the Film section above. Also an example of Uncanny Valley Makeup.
  • A certain type of birthmark known as the Mongolian spot (warning: link contains picture of a baby's bottom) causes the skin around the lower back and buttocks in small children to appear blue. While most commonly associated with East Asian and Polynesian ancestry, it has been recorded in children across the ethnic spectrum.
  • Kids without "proper" flesh-toned crayons/pencils/markers/et cetera will frequently default to more colorful options. Oranges seem to be common.
  • Strawberry marks aren't all that uncommon in babies, but some are born with unusually large patches of bright red areas due to those. Rare cases have them covering half the face or more — this can be corrected with cosmetic surgery, usually. Can also occur with children afflicted with large areas of hemangiomas — some of the skin will have the large, bright red masses, but other areas are just flat and red. This is also often dealt with surgically, especially if the hemangiomas get too large. Mikhail Gorbachev's forehead mark is perhaps the best-known example.
  • Even without genetic abnormalities or unusual diet, healthy human skin can be any shade of brown imaginable, and ranges from extremes of nearly white to blue-black. This is an amazing variety considering most of it only developed in the last 30,000 years or so of our evolution.
  • Carbon monoxide victims often have cherry red skin.
  • Cyanosis causes parts of the victim's body (usually the lips and fingertips) to turn blue. Cyanide often kills people this way, hence the name. Death by drowning can also cause this.

Alternative Title(s): Amazing Technicolour Population, Technicolor People, Technicolour People, Technicolor Person

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