The current industry standard for a skin color scale is the Fitzpatrick Scale, which was originally invented to test UV sensitivity for different skin colors. However, there seems to be a few flaws to this choice of scale:
- Limited to only 6 categories, the Fitzpatrick Scale is not inclusive enough, omitting some skin types
- Individuals who utilize this scale tend to conflate skin tone with race and ethnicity, identifying race through the scale
The new scale, the Monk Skin Tone Scale, is a restructured metric that includes 10 categories, attempting to be more inclusive yet concise enough that the use of it for AI model training is still efficient.