Tag Discussion: Ebony

With both the dark_skin and black_skin tags the ebony tag seems a bit redundant, even more so since the black_skin tag specifically mentions ebony coloration.

Given the somewhat subjective nature of trying to decide if a character is African/South American/Indian/Mediterranean/etc from their skin color and that there seems to be only one user actually applying the tag to any posts, perhaps it should be aliased to black_skin or dark_skin.
At the very least, the vague wiki page should be clarified if we keep the tag.

It's a little problematic - black skin seems to be for fantasy-type, pure-black skin (e.g. dark elfs), but dark skin is the general umbrella tag (and even covers cases of tan lines).

IMHO, ebony should implicate to dark skin, but the actual tagging of it makes it hard not to feel racist.

Kikimaru said:

the actual tagging of it makes it hard not to feel racist.

It does feel a bit distasteful.
When initially attempting to edit the wiki page I ran into the issue of how to make a difference between African or, say, Filipino. If we resort to African imagery we already have the (barely used)african tag and sorting the characters by darkness of skin color seems fairly racist and could lead to tag edit drama.

Tan vs dark_skin should be mostly binary unless it's someone with already dark skin with tanlines to signify the tan made the skin even darker, tanlines falling in with that.

I don't see the problem with sorting characters by skin color as long as it's kept clear that the tags are nothing more than objective observations - "tag what you see," like the rest of Danbooru. Although tagging opinion wars might be inevitable.

I would suggest the tag very dark skin to replace ebony, akin to very long hair. Seems neutral enough to me.

Alternately black skin could become 'pitch black skin' or something with the tag being switched to the colloquial definition, which might be more in line with what people expect to see on a search, but I prefer the former idea.

Necroing this thread because it doesn't look like there was a clear consensus.
The ebony wiki currently says "Use this tag for characters with distinct African origin or body features." "African body features" is kind of vague. And "characters with African origin" goes against tag-what-you-see.

I actually never heard of this tag before I saw it on post #1573003 but wait, it's stated in the game Adé is from Trinidad, not Africa </nerd>

Well, at the least I prefer very_dark_skin to ebony: If we're going to tag different gradients of skin color, better to make it a gradient worded system versus a color based one. So light/pale and dark, not ivory and ebony.

Yes, definitely very_dark_skin over ebony.

So to christen this new tag, alias ebony -> very_dark_skin

getserious said:

So to christen this new tag, alias ebony -> very_dark_skin

Done