At work we had to serve some court notices from the US on Indonesian firms. The form with the notices asked for descriptive details of the person receiving the notice. One of the details they asked for was skin colour (or color). As the notices were served by an Indonesian, we had a high old time assessing skin colours of people we knew and then trying to evolve a common vocabulary that would be reasonably meaningful for the recipient of the forms back in the US.

In English all I could think of was the obvious black, white, brown, yellow, olive, sallow, tanned.

Indonesian terms have white and black/dark, but otherwise seem to refer to fruit, e.g., ripe sawo.

Can anyone come up with more words to describe skin colour rather than race?

Bingley

Bingley