Danbooru

Hair color standardization thread

Posted under Tags

With that logic
aqua hair would become blue-green hair and vice versa
lavender hair -> pink-purple hair ...
with the old names implicated.

I don't actually hate that, it's pretty easy to understand for new people and you could get the weird "accurate" names from the wiki.

I did come up with a list of the proposed tertiary color combinations for the rainbow scale plus red-brown and orange-brown, attempting to add an approximate color hex code to each color for visual reference, but the forums won't allow me to use the hex codes like you can in Notes. The best I can do is just write the basic list here for reference, then make the tags as we agree to them, populate the tags, and use good image examples.

For natural shades, brown, blonde and red are covered here, and I don't think we need to worry about black. The only natural shades I haven't touched are grey and white due to contention between them, silver, shiny hair, and the like. The only grey combination I would bring up is grey-blue/blue-grey since a slate grey could be treated as silver.

Anyway, the WIP "tertiary hair color" list (for lack of a better term). I can update it as we discuss any additions or changes.

NATURAL SHADES
red-brown_hair / brown-red_hair (russet)
orange-brown_hair / brown-orange_hair (burnt orange)
purple-brown_hair / brown-purple_hair (maroon)

UNNATURAL SHADES
red-orange_hair / orange-red_hair (vermilion)
orange-blonde_hair / blonde-orange_hair (amber)
blonde-green_hair / green-blonde_hair (chartreuse)
green-blue_hair / blue-green_hair (teal/aqua)
blue-purple_hair / purple-blue_hair (indigo)
purple-red_hair / red-purple_hair (magenta)
purple-pink_hair / pink-purple_hair (lavender, as Keonas said)

It's extremely difficult to come up with examples that cover the pink-red_hair/red-pink_hair range, so I didn't bother.

Updated

skylightcrystal said:

I can't help but think these x-y names are clunky. Wouldn't it be better for the aliases go the other way around (eg. from blue-green hair to aqua hair rather than vice versa)?

Clunky yes, but I think we're trying to go for accuracy more than functionality at this point. Let's focus on making these tags in the first place. IMO, I would like to use the clunky tags first to at least standardize them for about a year or two. The more functional names can be written in the wiki and attached to image examples. Then when everyone is familiar with their usage, we can debate about whether or not we want aliases to the actual color terms

I actually wouldn't mind aliasing aqua hair to blue-green hair right now, but I think it would be better to put the general system of tags in place first.

On pink-purple hair it might be able to replace lavender hair but so could light purple hair. What are our thoughts of such tags like light brown hair and light blue hair? Are they uneccesary/vague? Should they implicate their main hair colour tag? Have the corresponding dark hair colour tags? Because if we're keeping them and making other (non-trivial)* related tags it would be good to know before and to implement them with the above.

*light red hair (since this isn't always pink hair); light orange hair etc.

kiyah123 said:

I actually wouldn't mind aliasing aqua hair to blue-green hair right now, but I think it would be better to put the general system of tags in place first.

On pink-purple hair it might be able to replace lavender hair but so could light purple hair. What are our thoughts of such tags like light brown hair and light blue hair? Are they uneccesary/vague? Should they implicate their main hair colour tag? Have the corresponding dark hair colour tags? Because if we're keeping them and making other (non-trivial)* related tags it would be good to know before and to implement them with the above.

*light red hair (since this isn't always pink hair); light orange hair etc.

Personally I use the light brown hair tag alot since it looks quite different than normal brown hair, light blue hair I don't use at all since I don't think the difference is big enough.

kiyah123 said:

I actually wouldn't mind aliasing aqua hair to blue-green hair right now, but I think it would be better to put the general system of tags in place first.

On pink-purple hair it might be able to replace lavender hair but so could light purple hair. What are our thoughts of such tags like light brown hair and light blue hair? Are they uneccesary/vague? Should they implicate their main hair colour tag? Have the corresponding dark hair colour tags? Because if we're keeping them and making other (non-trivial)* related tags it would be good to know before and to implement them with the above.

*light red hair (since this isn't always pink hair); light orange hair etc.

Maybe light brown hair can stay since it's an acceptable color in nature and can be compared to real-life examples. The more exotic colors like light blue hair or light purple hair could go since they're highly subjective.

I'm iffy on making tags for darker shades, although there are instances of black hair that has a tint of a particular color while not having two-tone_hair (post #3055307, post #2647829, post #2595595). In my experience, I've mainly seen purple, blue and brown as popular tints for black hair. Maybe we could make tinted_black_hair as an umbrella tag to separate them from true black hair? That also begs the question of whether or not an implication to black_hair would be warranted.

I wouldn't supporting aliasing aqua over to blue-green or green-blue, but I'm fine with supporting temporarily creating these tags as a test case on whether they're worthwhile. IMO I would expect that the clunky names will end up aliased to other names, as I honestly don't see the worth of the clunky naming when they can still serve their value by being aliased over to a different name.

I might be surprised, but my honest expectation of these tags is that the bulk of them are going to be utter failures and that the degree of difference is too fine to actually be worthwhile and will be worse messes on maintaining than the currently existing colors being used overly broad.

NWF_Renim said:

I wouldn't supporting aliasing aqua over to blue-green or green-blue, but I'm fine with supporting temporarily creating these tags as a test case on whether they're worthwhile. IMO I would expect that the clunky names will end up aliased to other names, as I honestly don't see the worth of the clunky naming when they can still serve their value by being aliased over to a different name.

I might be surprised, but my honest expectation of these tags is that the bulk of them are going to be utter failures and that the degree of difference is too fine to actually be worthwhile and will be worse messes on maintaining than the currently existing colors being used overly broad.

Maybe some of them will fail while others will be useful. The problem is that we just don't know at the moment. Like you said, we can simply test run to get some hard facts about these tertiary hair colors since it's never been done before. The question is if we want to test all or some of these tags, how long would we want to temporarily populate them before coming back here with some actual results and debating about them? Would we want a week, or a month, or something longer as the testing period?

I'd say realistically it has to be at least 6 months or longer, because if it's too short all it'll reflect is the efforts of the tag gardeners who wanted to create the tag. We actually won't get an idea of what the tags will really become until there is time for the usage of the tags to become more wide spread, and thus see how the larger population as a whole perceive what belongs within the tag. If it's a complete mess in the end that makes it appear not much different from the existing primary color tags, then we'll get an idea of if it is worth retaining or not.

Benit149 said:

I'm iffy on making tags for darker shades, although there are instances of black hair that has a tint of a particular color while not having two-tone_hair (post #3055307, post #2647829, post #2595595). In my experience, I've mainly seen purple, blue and brown as popular tints for black hair. Maybe we could make tinted_black_hair as an umbrella tag to separate them from true black hair? That also begs the question of whether or not an implication to black_hair would be warranted.

None of those posts should be considered "black hair" IMO. Things tagged "black" really should be completely black, not darker shades of a particular color. Personally, I would prefer it if "dark hair" were unaliased and used as a separate tag.

NWF_Renim said:

I might be surprised, but my honest expectation of these tags is that the bulk of them are going to be utter failures and that the degree of difference is too fine to actually be worthwhile and will be worse messes on maintaining than the currently existing colors being used overly broad.

I'm inclined to agree. As I stated in the original post, the more gradations you add to the list of color tags, the more inaccuracy and subjectivity you're bound to introduce. What looks like "purple-red" to one viewer may just be "purple" to another. Even if tertiary color tags gain widespread acceptance, I can only foresee a couple outcomes: one, similar shades of hair color get divided among different tags based on taggers' color calibration, necessitating searches like ~purple-red_hair ~purple_hair, or two, we get more posts with multiple hair color tags per character just to make sure we're covering all the bases. Neither case seems like much of an improvement over the status quo.

I'm not surprised at how much the status quo is preferred over testing something new. Unless there's an overwhelming desire from many users to implement a tertiary hair color system, I'm not going to bother with this discussion anymore. I wouldn't consider it closed, but it's clearly too subjective a topic for us to tackle at this time.

Personally I'd keep all the light ones but none of the dark ones.

Or alternatively keep both and then implicate them to the main colour.

Updated

I don't really care if light/dark hair colours (and eye colours for that matter) stay, but they really should imply their base colour - for example, light_blue_hair should imply blue_hair.

I also think hair colours such as platinum blonde, aqua, maroon etc. are good for when hair is halfway between two or three other colours and could conceivably be tagged with them all. However, to avoid being mistagged they should have concretely defined wikis, featuring clear examples of the colour that were decided on by multiple active uploaders/taggers.

AngryZapdos said:

I don't really care if light/dark hair colours (and eye colours for that matter) stay, but they really should imply their base colour - for example, light_blue_hair should imply blue_hair.

I also think hair colours such as platinum blonde, aqua, maroon etc. are good for when hair is halfway between two or three other colours and could conceivably be tagged with them all. However, to avoid being mistagged they should have concretely defined wikis, featuring clear examples of the colour that were decided on by multiple active uploaders/taggers.

But what happens if a character's hair is halfway between say platinum blonde and blonde hair, or maroon hair and brown hair, do we make a new tag for that?

Unbreakable said:

But what happens if a character's hair is halfway between say platinum blonde and blonde hair, or maroon hair and brown hair, do we make a new tag for that?

Well, do we really need a specific tag for something that is halfway between maroon and brown?

https://mycolor.space/gradient?ori=to+right+top&hex=%23800000&hex2=%23654321

Maroon's already an edge case. If it's a maroon that's too brown, it's just brown. I can understand having a light brown to differentiate it from normal brown, because those two are very common colors, but I don't think we need a tag for every shade, otherwise we might as well implement a color picker in the upload page and use hex colors tags, like #00ffff_hair_color.