What Is Your Hex Code? An Eclectic Take on Skin Colour & Race

Do you know your own hex code?

Below is my hand, phone camera, ordinary daylight, no filter, no edit. I ran a colour picker over a patch of skin on the back of it and got this back: #B4886D, which is possibly a shade of orange. I am the second orange person in the world after the omni-potent orange President in the White House.

But there it is, my hex code, or so it says.

For anyone who hasn't met one before, a hex code is simply a six digit string of letters and numbers, a kind of phone number for colour, unique enough that no two shades are meant to share one and precise enough that a designer on one side of the world can hand it to a printer on the other side and get back exactly the colour they meant, not roughly the colour, exactly.

Except mine isn't exact, not really, and here's the statutory caution before this goes any further. A phone photo cannot give you an accurate hex code for your own skin, and it's worth knowing exactly why, because the reasons are more interesting than the number itself.

Your phone's camera applies automatic white balance the instant you press the shutter, correcting the colours in the frame based on what it thinks the light source is, warm indoor bulb, overcast sky, mixed lighting near a window, and it guesses. Skin isn't even a flat colour to begin with, it's translucent, light scatters under the surface before bouncing back out, so the same patch of hand will read differently depending on the angle it's held at.

Then the image gets compressed, JPEG discards colour information you'll never get back. Then whatever screen you're viewing it on renders that already-altered file through its own calibration, which is different again from the phone that took it. Real colorimetry, the kind used in a lab or a professional print studio, needs a calibrated reference card in the shot, something with a known, certified colour, so the software has a fixed point to correct everything else against. A selfie has none of that.

#B4886D is not a scientific fact about me. It is a rough, lighting-dependent, device-dependent estimate, worth exactly as much as the conditions it was taken in.

Which is, funnily enough, a rather good description of most of what gets used to sort people into racial categories too, a rough estimate, taken under whatever conditions happened to be available, treated afterwards as though it were a fact.

There might be a real product hiding in that gap, incidentally. Proper skin-tone colorimetry through a phone camera, calibrated properly, reference card, consistent lighting protocol, the kind of thing beauty tech and dermatology already do with dedicated hardware. Someone will build that well eventually. This isn't that. This is a hand, a hunch, and a number that's more honest about its own limits than most racial categories have ever been.

Which brings me to my daughter.

My daughter is four. Last month she asked me to pass her the beige cup, and I looked at the shelf, saw white cups, and picked one up. Wrong one. She pointed past it to a cup that was, to my adult eyes, also basically white. "No Daddy, that one is white," she said, jabbing her finger at a different cup entirely, "this one is beige." A few days later she corrected me again, I called something blue, she called it turquoise, and she was right both times. Somewhere between nursery and adulthood, most of us stop looking that closely.

We had a whole colour wheel once. Somewhere along the way, we traded it in for four or five crayons and called it identity.

So here it is, the question underneath all of this. What is your hex code? Not your race or your ethnicity box on the census form, your actual hex code, or as close as you can honestly get to one.

I would put real money on this, you are not #FFFFFF which stands for white. You are some flavour of beige, cream, terracotta, walnut, amber. There are roughly sixteen million possible combinations in the hex system, and we have decided, as a species, that five or six labels will do the job of describing every human being who has ever lived.

That is not diversity. That is a rounding error dressed up as a category.

Nobody Taught You to Stop Looking

There is a reason children see colour with more precision than adults and it is not better eyes. Nobody has taught them yet to collapse nuance into a label for convenience. This is not just a nice observation either, it is documented.

Researchers comparing English speaking children with Himba speaking children in Namibia found the correlation between colour memory and available language grew stronger as linguistic competence developed, exactly what linguistic relativity theory predicts. Himba colour categories historically numbered five, against eleven in English, and retested recently, that number has already grown to seven. The categories are not fixed, they expand the moment a group needs to see more finely than before.

Once English settled on "white" and "black" as the load bearing words for skin, an enormous amount of visible, measurable variation simply stopped registering, not because it disappeared, but because nobody was naming it any more. The linguist Norman Fairclough called this naturalisation, a category that starts life as one choice among many and through sheer repetition, stops sounding like a choice at all. It just sounds like reality.

There's a second order effect worth naming too. Fewer categories don't just narrow what people notice, they narrow what people are able to think, and eventually what they're able to disagree about without simply picking a side.

When only two boxes exist, everyone standing somewhere in the middle gets steadily pushed toward whichever pole is closer, because the vocabulary offers no stable place to stand in between. Fewer categories produce fewer perceptions, fewer perceptions produce fewer perspectives, and fewer perspectives, over time, produce exactly the kind of flattened, two-sided argument culture we now call polarisation.

The colour wheel didn't just lose detail. It lost the middle ground.

Your Brain Is Also Cutting Corners

Well, Daniel Kahneman gave us the mechanism for why this happens inside a single mind, not just inside a language. Broad categorisation is what he called a System 1 shortcut, fast, cheap, automatic. Sorting someone into a wide bucket costs almost nothing, describing them specifically costs real effort, and the brain will always take the free option unless something forces it to slow down. Racial shorthand is not a failure of attention, it is attention doing exactly what it is built to do, at the direct expense of accuracy.

This is not a hunch, either. Skin colour sits second in the order traits get read and judged, right behind gender, ahead of your name, ahead of your accent, ahead of anything you've actually said or written. It gets filed before a person has had the chance to offer a single other thing about themselves.

Now bolt the psychology of being on the receiving end onto that. Frantz Fanon had a word for what happens the instant skin colour gets read before a single word is exchanged, he called it epidermalisation, a whole set of assumptions attached to a person on sight. If the box says "white" and you are technically a warm beige rather than porcelain, there is a quiet incentive to round yourself up, to claim whichever category confers the advantage. W. E. B. Du Bois named the resulting condition over a century ago as double consciousness, seeing yourself constantly through the eyes of whichever category is dominant, while holding a private, truer sense of who you actually are. It is exhausting, invisible labour, and it falls hardest on people who were never handed the luxury of being the assumed default.

If your actual hex code sits closer to camel or copper or deep umber, the same crude system rounds you down into "black" or "non-white" regardless of how far you genuinely sit from either end. Fanon called the position this creates the zone of non-being, a permanent obligation to prove a humanity that others are simply granted on arrival.

When the Shortcut Becomes Government Policy

And then, the labelling problem becomes a governing one. Michel Foucault's whole body of work rests on a simple, uncomfortable point, whoever gets to define a category exercises power over everyone sorted into it.

Antonio Gramsci went further, once a category feels like plain common sense rather than a choice, it stops needing defending, because nobody thinks to question something that obvious. That is precisely how broad racial categories have survived this long.

Broad racial categories have never just described people, they have sorted them, for census purposes, for immigration law, for who gets which passport queue, historically for who gets which side of a line drawn through a country. South Africa's Population Registration Act of 1950 legally required every citizen be classified into one of four boxes, and where the boxes did not obviously fit, officials ran the so called pencil test, pushing a pencil through someone's hair to see whether it fell out or stayed put. A pencil, deciding rights. That is what happens when a state insists reality only comes in four or five flavours, then hands a bureaucrat the job of forcing every human being into one of them.

We did not run out of colours. We ran out of patience for describing each other accurately, and called the shortcut a race.

The Category Is Already Cracking

Here is the thing sociologists have actually settled on, even if the settlement hasn't reached the census form yet. Michael Omi and Howard Winant's racial formation theory, one of the most cited frameworks in the field, argues that race is neither a fixed biological fact nor a convenient illusion we could simply stop believing in. It is something actively built, fought over, and rebuilt, again and again, through what they call racial projects, deliberate efforts by governments, institutions, and culture to define what a category means and who gets sorted into it.

Race isn't discovered. It's manufactured, on an ongoing basis, and the manufacturing shows.

You can watch it crack in real time in the UK census data. The number of people in England and Wales identifying as mixed ethnicity tripled between 2001 and 2021, now standing at 1.7 million. The fastest growing group within that wasn't any of the neat, pre-set combinations, it was the category the form itself calls "Other Mixed," up 61 percent in a single decade, people whose actual identity simply would not fit into any of the boxes the form-makers had thought to provide. That is not a demographic footnote. That is the five-box system visibly failing under the weight of real people living real lives that refuse to sit still inside it.

Where This Goes Next

Naming the problem is the easy part. Eclectic Leadership's Roles & Layers model is the method built to act on it, Roles reminding you nobody is reducible to one identity, Layers naming which single trait a snap judgement is actually running on before you've noticed. Skin colour sits second in that order, right behind gender, ahead of name, accent, and everything you've actually said or done. That's a subject substantial enough for its own piece, coming soon. For now, the practical version is simpler than any framework, notice the shortcut before it notices for you.

My daughter was not making a philosophical statement when she corrected me about the cup, she still has the eyes for it. Somewhere between four and adulthood, the world trains that precision out of most of us, and replaces it with a shortcut that happens to be extremely convenient for maintaining old hierarchies.

Getting it back is not therapy, it is a discipline.

So, genuinely, what is your hex code. Not the label you tick on a form, the actual one. And what have you been rounding yourself, or someone else, up or down to, without ever quite noticing.

Eclectically yours,

Shehzaad

London, UK

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Where do you sit?

1. When filling in a form, do you tick the box that's technically closest or the one that's simplest to explain?

2. In the last month, have you noticed yourself or someone else default to a broad label rather than a specific one?

3. Have you corrected someone else's assumption about your own background in the last year?

4. Does your workplace's diversity data use more than the standard four or five categories?

5. When you meet someone new, do you register detail, or shorthand?

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References

• American Psychological Association (2005) 'Hues and Views', Monitor on Psychology, 36(2).

• Du Bois, W.E.B. (1903) The Souls of Black Folk. Chicago: A. C. McClurg & Co.

• Fairclough, N. (1992) Discourse and Social Change. Cambridge: Polity Press.

• Fanon, F. (1952) Black Skin, White Masks. Paris: Editions du Seuil.

• Fanon, F. (1961) The Wretched of the Earth. Paris: Francois Maspero.

• Foucault, M. (1975) Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. Paris: Editions Gallimard.

• Gowdy, J. et al. (2022) 'Augmenting a Colour Lexicon', Humanities and Social Sciences Communications, 9, Article 23.

• Gramsci, A. (1971) Selections from the Prison Notebooks. London: Lawrence & Wishart.

• Kahneman, D. (2011) Thinking, Fast and Slow. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux.

• Office for National Statistics (2022) Census 2021: Ethnic group, England and Wales. London: ONS.

• Omi, M. and Winant, H. (1986) Racial Formation in the United States. New York: Routledge.

• Population Registration Act (1950) Republic of South Africa.

• Roberson, D. et al. (2005), reported in 'Hues and Views', Monitor on Psychology, American Psychological Association, 36(2).

• Sapir, E. and Whorf, B.L. Linguistic Relativity, various works, 1920s-1950s.

• Shams, S. (2026) Roles & Layers: Onion Layers of Stereotyping. Unpublished internal framework, Eclectic Leadership Movement.