For all your color needs

[tsaiko]

If you are a writer and want to get creative in describing your character's hair/eye color, please for the love of all that is holy, know what color you are using. Amaranth is not a shade a purple. I can only assume you were thinking amethyst when you wrote that. If you are not sure, Wikipedia has a very awesome list o' colors to help you out. They

Comments

[kiyoshi_chan]

Poor Duo, such an indignity. XD;;;

I find it interesting that because Chinese have pretty uniform hair and eye colour, descriptions of characters' eye/hair tend to emphasise lustre (hair), sparkliness (eyes), length (hair), glossiness (hair), shape (eyes), indications of character (eyes) and so on.

Incidentally, stuff like curly hair is virtually unknown in Chinese stories that don't have stuff like perming or cross-cultural couples. Descriptions of people tend to also include their voices, choice of words, behaviour... It's really interesting.

...And at least I've never seen anyone's eyes described as pink, although I get really sick of black and brown. :P

[tsaiko]

I kind of wish more authors (fanfic, original and published) would go into description other than just listing colors. Instead, you only get anything else as an afterthought. Like only describing the princess's long, shiny hair that flows gently in the breeze (and never tangling or getting stuck in something sticky I notice) and describing everyone else as having "brown hair."

I think having such a variety of colors to tell people apart makes author's lazy sometimes. You wind up with stories with 1 red-head, 1 blonde, 1 burnette, and 1 black hair person just so the author doesn't have to go into any more detail. Even if only two colors would get boring, at least it makes people more creative. XD

[kiyoshi_chan]

You do have a point. But after a while, believe me, everyone sounds the same.

...Although that could be because I mostly read romance novels in Chinese, cough. They're pretty insistent on description of every kind though. My grasp of Chinese isn't too great, so I wanted to die about a page into "The Return of the Condor Heroes". It was a scene where someone was floating on a boat on a river surrounded by peaceful willows and mountains and utter silence, that kind of thing? And it was a FULL PAGE (or more) of flowery prose. Probably more, now that I think about it.

I gave up at that point. Honestly, even English books with that much description I roll my eyes at.

[mullenkamp]

...I'd also add "please don't refer to gemstones unless the character actually HAS artificial eyes made of stone, it's so overdone and cliched, especially if you also call them 'orbs'", but I'm generally annoyed by the fanfic world and their purple prose these days.

[tsaiko]

I have to admit I went through the gemstone eye phase. Granted I had just discovered fanfiction after years of being a romance novel fan, so I didn't exactly have the best examples to follow. Now I know better.

[m_steelgrave]

I think I've gotten so used to reading scripts that anything more than the barest description strikes me as purple. I kind of wish that wasn't the case.

But yes, I remember a fanfic author in the GW realm who always described Duo as having, "amaryllis eyes." I don't know about you, but the amaryllis we get every year at Christmas is red.

[zeffy_amethyst]

Well, I suppose it'd depend on whether Duo was suffering pink eye. XD [/smartarse]