Monk Skin Tone Scale
The Monk Skin Tone Scale (MST) is an open-source, 10-shade scale describing human skin color. It was developed by Ellis Monk in partnership with Google and released in 2023.
The scale intends to replace the Fitzpatrick scale in fields such as computer vision research after an IEEE study found the Fitzpatrick scale to be "poorly predictive of skin tone." They noted that it tends to under-represent dark shades of skin relative to the global human population. The researchers then advised it "not be used as such in evaluations of computer vision applications."
The following table shows the 10 categories of the Monk Skin Tone Scale alongside the six categories of the Fitzpatrick scale, grouped into broad skin tone categories:
| Skin tone group | Monk scale 10 levels
| Fitzpatrick scale 6 levels
| ||
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Levels | Allocation | Levels | Allocation | |
| Light | 1–3 | 30% | I–II | 33% |
| Medium | 4–6 | 30% | III–IV | 33% |
| Dark | 7–10 | 40% | V–VI | 33% |
This table displays the colors of the ten MST skin tones:
| #f6ede4 |
| #f3e7db |
| #f7ead0 |
| #eadaba |
| #d7bd96 |
| #a07e56 |
| #825c43 |
| #604134 |
| #3a312a |
| #292420 |