Making skin colour research more inclusive
Finding a foundation that matches your skin or taking a photograph that captures your appearance accurately may seem like modest expectations. However, both rely on how well products and technologies account for human diversity. These everyday experiences offer an opportunity to consider whose needs shape research, and how colour science can contribute to better representation of darker skin tones.
Kaida Xiao, Professor of Colour and Imaging Science at the School of Design and the Leeds Institute of Textiles and Colour (LITAC), researches how we measure, perceive and reproduce skin colour, connecting scientific understanding with applications in cosmetics and digital imaging.
He writes: "I am interested in cosmetics for darker skin tones because colour science can help address an everyday problem: finding products that faithfully match someone’s skin tone. Matching foundation involves more than selecting a lighter or darker shade: subtle differences in undertone and how people perceive them also matter.
Research can help us understand these differences and assess whether products meet people’s needs. This requires attention to the diversity within darker skin tones, rather than treating them as a single category.
Impact
- Collaboration with industry to ensure skin colour representation across cosmetics and smartphone photography.
Key information
- Major funders: Tecno, Estée Lauder, LITAC development fund
- Partners and collaborators: International Commission on Illumination (CIE)
- Disciplines: design, technology
- Investigators: Professor Kaida Xiao.
Connecting research and industry
At Leeds Institute of Textiles and Colour (LITAC), research brings together expertise in textiles, colour and fashion to develop new science, technologies and approaches to real-world challenges. Its strong links with industry and other external partners help connect academic research with practical needs.
Similarly, partnerships with external brands connect academic expertise with practical challenges. Industry brings questions about products and consumers’ experiences, while researchers contribute experiments, measurement methods and evidence.
The collaboration with The Estée Lauder Companies, announced in August 2026, investigates how people perceive skin undertones and small colour differences. By connecting these judgements with instrument measurements, the research aims to support more precise shade matching in everyday viewing conditions.
The International Skin Spectra Archive
Representative data provide a foundation for this work. In 2025, the international team published the International Skin Spectra Archive, or ISSA, a publicly accessible database containing more than 15,000 skin colour measurement records from over 2,000 participants.
These records describe how skin reflects different wavelengths of light, supporting research into skin colour variation and applications in cosmetics and digital imaging. A shared measurement protocol helps researchers compare data collected across different locations.
We continue to work towards broader representation in the database, including through our efforts to collect skin colour measurements in Tanzania. This work aims to capture more of the diversity within darker skin tones. Building an inclusive database requires attention to who participates, alongside the quality and consistency of the measurements.
For me, ethical beauty means ensuring that a wider range of people can benefit from research. It involves respecting people’s preferences about their appearance, collecting and using data responsibly, and examining whose needs remain underserved. Better colour science should support individual choice and help people find products that suit them.
The project also considers local lighting conditions and people’s preferences about how they appear in photographs. Accurate skin colour reproduction and optional photographic enhancement serve different purposes. Both require scientific measurement and an understanding of users’ preferences.
Honouring communities
Community is central to that understanding. International collaborators contribute knowledge from different settings, and participants make skin colour research possible. Listening to people’s experiences can reveal problems that laboratory measurements alone cannot explain. Black communities should have opportunities to inform research questions and how improvements are assessed.
By bringing together colour science, industry collaboration and community knowledge, this work can contribute to a more inclusive approach to how people’s appearances are measured, represented and understood, both in the products they use and the technologies they rely on.
These connections between colour science, digital innovation, data and human-centred research are also at the heart of the wider work taking place at LITAC, and I look forward to sharing more pioneering research and ideas at the International Textile and Colour Conference in Leeds next year.