Why Do Our Children Think That Skin Color Is A Light Shade Of Pink?

Three years ago we conducted an experiment as students for our thesis and the result surprised all of us.

When you look at your average classroom, you see a range of different skin tones paying attention to the teacher. But when they are asked to color skin they all grab the same crayon: light pink.

This showed that every child, whatever the background, considers light pink as the standard color for skin. That’s why we developed a set of 7 skin tone crayons to add to any other set. Over the years we repeated the experiment in several schools. And now together with our agency we made it into a national campaign.

We launched The Skin Color Collection* together with Belgian School Network SOM ‘Samen Onderwijs Maken’. It's a set of crayons to add to your own crayon collection and to encourage everyone to broaden their look on diversity. A conversation starter for many children, teachers and parents.

Our society is getting more and more diverse, but still we don’t succeed to look at each other the same way. How we look at people is often conditioned behaviour that we have learned during our childhood. With our set of crayons we hope that we can talk to children about diversity in a creative way and that we bring society closer to understand that all skin tones are equal.

https://www.samenonderwijsmaken.be/skin-color-collection

More info: samenonderwijsmaken.be