Show HN: Simple algorithm and color space to generate diverse skin tones

What Colors Are We? Constructing A Good Enough Color Space For Skin Tones If you're just looking for the results, below is a custom color picker based on the color space written in Javascript and a sample procedural generation algorithm in Python (Javascript equivalents are in the page source) - feel free to take this math and go have fun depicting our diverse world! The goal of this project was to define a color space that makes it easier to build inclusive color tools for a variety of contexts - such as character creators or digital art. If you see something here that sparks your curiosity, I would love for you to stick around and read below this section to learn more! R² = (What's R²?) │ Show Sphere What is each direction on the picker adjusting? Jump to that explanation here. # Plug the output of one of the select_point implementations into to_rgb(t, u, v) def select_point(r_square: float = 2.) -> tuple[float, float, float]: """Uniformly sample from the sphere deterministically""" radius = r_square ** (1. / 2) phi = uniform(0, 2 * math.pi) costheta = uniform(-1, 1) n = uniform(0, 1) theta = math.acos(costheta) r = radius * (n ** (1.0 / 3)) t = r * math.sin(theta) * math.cos(phi) u = r * math.sin(theta) * math.sin(phi) v = r * math.cos(theta) return (t, u, v) def select_point(r_square: float = 2.) -> tuple[float, float, float]: """Uniformly sample from the sphere using rejection sampling""" radius = r_square ** (1. / 2) R = radius + 1 while R > radius: t = uniform(-radius, radius) u = uniform(-radius, radius) v = uniform(-radius, radius) R = (t**2 + u**2 + v**2) ** (1.0 / 2) return (t, u, v) def to_rgb(t, u, v) -> tuple[int, int, int]: x = (t - 0.15) / 0.45 y = (v - 1.2 * t ** 2 + 0.2 * t + 0.655) / 1.84 z = u / 3.6 r = 28.77438370854 * x + 36.78307445559 * y - 19.69766918644 * z + 187.1436241611 g = 35.38327306318 * x - 2.009931981182 * y + 47.93462563172 * z + 137.1073825503 b = 36.14733717939 * x - 43.54346996173 * y - 28.50821294135 * z + 108.2241610738 return int(r), int(g), int(b) # Overview What colors are we? The short answer is maybe something like “brown” and the long answer is very, very long. Representing the broad range of human skin tones digitally is a hard problem. Often, a limited set of colors is presented as being good enough to cover the full spectrum of diversity. However, in using a specific set of colors, large groups of people are unable to accurately be represented, or might be unintentionally excluded. The goal of this work is to identify the broadest inclusive range of colors in the RGB color space that correspond to plausible, but simplified skin tones. In particular, the aim was to identify simple, “good enough” equations which define that area, allowing the range to be used in a variety of contexts. Calling the equations "good enough" is intended to keep the limitations of this