"Skin" Coloured Plasters

Hello friends,

I felt a moment of cognitive dissonance, as I heard the nurse refer to the plaster that she had just put on my arm as "skin" coloured.

I was 60 years old, and I had just had a plaster that matched my skin tone for the first time in my life, and that despite the fact that I have spent around half of my life in Barbados, a country populated mostly by people racialised as Black. (But of course, also a country with a long history of colonisation and domination by those racialised as white, so there's that.) Without exception, they were either pale cream or pale pink or something in between.

The same applied to various kinds of underwear and accessories: bras, stockings, tights and so on. Not a single "flesh" coloured item ever matched the tone of my flesh.

I had always found this a little bit offensive. After all, if human skin comes in a variety of shades, shouldn't the things that are meant to cover human skin also come in a variety of shades?

But until the last couple of decades, and more so the last few years, all these "flesh" coloured items remained resolutely pale, stuck at one end of the colour spectrum. It's the reason why, until very recently, Black and Global majority ballerinas couldn't find tights and shoes that matched their skin tone, and the same things that were meant to blend in on paler skin provided a sharp contrast on theirs.

But back to this moment.

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