Is it just me, or did porn actors and actresses used to be quite tanned - and, in addition, their makeup and/or lighting made their skin look a healthy "orange" (sometimes even quite extemely so) -
and - in new porn scenes (thinking mostly of gonzo style stuff) - especially the *actresses* - are all chalk-white-pale, almost to the level that their skin looks translucent? and - in some scenes (where the background is very white and the lighting is very harsh fluorescent white) - everything looks more like a hospital room or a morgue?
compare this:
to this:
and i just randomly tried to choose stuff that demonstrates my point, even if obviously not ALL older porn scenes look like the first and not ALL new porn scenes look like the 2nd
i'm just trying to understand how or why is all this paleness coming from?
Far be it for me to point the major difference between your two examples but one is obviously shot outside and the other inside. One of the reason why makeup is essential when shooting an individual inside is where only artificial lighting is used is that skin reacts to that artificial light differently then it does to natural light. In the case of that LP video the lighting issue is compounded by the fact that the walls happen to be white and that's going to make the performer look even more pale. When you have a chance go take a picture of yourself standing near a white wall and once near a dark wall and see how you face looks in both cases. You should notice that you look paler with the white wall. Then go outside where it's sunny and take a similar picture and you will notice a difference from those two inside shots.
The kind of porn LP produces is such that they don't often give a rats ass what the performer looks like because we won't spend a lot of time looking at her face since it's more her hass that is the star of the show. More precisely the amount of toys and dicks she can have shoved into it.
1. colour balance preferences (especially when it comes to legalporno and Blacked) 2. Many girls getting into porn today are recruited by people who browse social media for girls that fit a particular look. These days are the age of the "innocent young thin teen" look, and part of that look is paler skin.
There may be other reasons but in my opinion these are big ones.
scene is dark, colorful, everyone looks tanned and healthy
doesn't feel like a morgue
and i beg to disagree about LP - even their OWN scenes (despite the bright setting) used to have much more tanned/colorful people in them, that didn't feel like ghosts
take this anjelica/abby scene for example:
they're still full of actual "human" color and look of life and vitality,
and not like pale ghosts (and i apologize to all the genuinely ghost-skinned people out there - you're just not my taste when it comes to porn)
no one can claim that these two girls don't fit the "innocent skinny white teen" --- but they are still orange-y in their color and not CHALK WHITE
and funny you bring up social media, cause on social media girls often go to great lengths to make them appear more tanned than they actually are the only people who i know are somehow obsessed with the color of CHALK on humans are like SOME South Asians or something - for whom darker complexion is the norm so they see very pale white women as the "exotic" style (i guess)
and ya -- if we're on the topic of the "visual style" - it's definitely not just the girls or skin colors, there's definitely a trend of making the entire fucking shot appear to have the same color:
like - wtf is going on here? the girl is the same color as the couch, which is the same color as the floor and the walls (that scene is from Perfect Gonzo btw) the only thing that has any color in this scene is the guy (and there's scenes where the guy is pale too)
i just don't get it
obviously there are exceptions, but since when is watching pale people have sex in bright white rooms with bright cold light become such a big trend?
Ah, but those are the "sexy" girls, who are therefore not innocent (because good looking girls are automatically sluts and all that sexist bullshit). Those aren't the girls the recruiters are looking for. They're looking for the diamonds in the rough, who are beautiful but don't know it (or at least look like they don't know it). Therefore doing things like tanning, wearing a lot of make-up etc would count against them (for these recruiters).
I'm not saying that any of this stuff makes sense, or that any of it is a good thing. I'm just hoping to provide a bit of insight into how I think we got here. The answer to when we got here is probably in the last 10 years or less.
As to why we got here, that I can't answer.
[edit: a further insight - I think the recruiters are, in a simple way, looking for the "anti-Kardashian".]
Also, at least in Europe, tanning is a lot less popular nowadays, due to concerns about skin cancer. Which has also made the fake tans less popular. So there are simply a lot more pale girls now than 10 or 20 years ago.
what you're describing seems to describe the general japanese mentality towards porn: i.e. - the more innocent, reluctant, or whatever - the more the girl is (generally) appealing to the wide japanese taste i always felt the WESTERN taste in porn is different exactly because the west is more liberal about sex, and doesn't have so much hangups as more conservative societies
so i guess while plausible, your explanation still feels lacking to me. also, a lot of these pale girls and pale scenes don't even make any effort to create this allure of "innocence" that you describe (i.e. the model is obviously not young nor even made to look young or innocent) in fact, they could act quite SLUTTY in the scene itself, maybe even dirty talk, have tattoos or whatever -
i think it's more an aesthetic issue than a cultural or societal one, i just can't fathom why things would evolve this way
i never imagined i would be missing the COLOR SCHEME of past porn
now, it's true that there's still quite a few productions still making an effort to have a normal (and healthy) color balance --
but it's like - whenever i see any old scene from Private or whatever i just know it would be full of vivid colors that resembles how reality actually looks like (and even takes it one or two steps further in terms of saturation and contrast) and whenever i look at a new scene - 8 times out of 10 it's a ghost-white girl in some fluorescent-lighted pale room
I have to say, what bothers me most about late 90s / early 2000s porn ist not the poor video and sound quality or the way they often replaced the original audio track with a cheesy-ridiculous post dubbing, but the extreme tan or fake tan many girls wore. The prevalent ideal of beauty and aesthetics has changed since then, and I agree that awareness of skin cancer risks might have played a part in it. I don't see too many tanning salons in my neighborhood any more either. No offense intended of course, everyone to his taste.
when i use the word "tan" it's just because there is no good alternative term that i know of, but i don't need girls to look like they have fried themselves in cooking oil -
i just need them to have what i would call a "normal" human skin color, which isn't chalk white
maybe it's just cause i live in a sunny region of the world, where people are NATURALLY darker skinned, that i have this aversion to paleness
but look at the photos i uploaded for example does it really look like abby or her co-star are "tanned"? or like they used a tanning bed? no, they just look normal, as if there's actual stuff behind their skin, and they're not the color of a WALL or worse - pink
i think the ideals of beauty (in the US at least) shifted towards preferring darker skin (e.g. kardashian, zendaya, etc.) and less of the classic pale white (err... julia roberts?)
so, if anything we should be seeing MORE "tanned" girls in porn, not less
anyway, just so i understand - do you honestly find the photos i gave as examples of paleness to be more arousing/appealing than the ones i gave as examples of tanned-skin?
My preference is pale skin. It's the most delicate. You see imperfections or in case of beautiful women how beautiful their skin is.
Pale skin, pink lips, pink pussy, pink nipples is the look. It is also is my image of youthfulness. Dark nipples > probably a milf. On darker skin tones there are less distinct features, everything is more subtle. You could say it's less attractive. Black skin pink pussy is also a good look but we don't have black performers. Anything in between pale or black is less attractive to me.
to me these chalk-white figures look sickly and even somewhat alien
humans need to have some warmth to the shade of their skin...
that's how you know they're alive and not a corpse, since they still have blood running through their veins
anyway, i was more interested to know how or why this trend began, more than to know that it has its fanbase (because obviously like in anything, the market follows the taste of the crowd)
to me, this:
healthy, darker skin color correlates with health, physical activity (outside, in the sun), travel, positivity, summer, vitality, etc.
while this: feels to me like it was taken from a scene in a morgue in the show "CSI" or something (no offense to the girl of course or any other light skinned people - i'm light skinned myslef, but even light skinned people can use some make up to look less pale...)
call it whatever you want, when i was a teen growing up, people look normal in porn and had a normal skin color (again i'm stressing they don't have to look like fried potato chips, look at the photo of abby above, she is a very "caucasian" russian girl - but still looks healthy)
NOW 80% of the porn i encounter is full of pink/chalk-white wraiths - who are the same color as the wall of the scene they are in
who the hell cares what was the beauty standard 500 years ago? in pre-historic africa, the beauty standard glorified fat women.... so?
we're talking about the digital age, and modern times
the biggest stars today in the U.S are definitely NOT pale-white. they are the exact opposite.
i was actually talking about the biggest CELEBRITIES, not the biggest pornstars it is even more indicative of the general public's "aesthetic preferences" than who the biggest pornstars are (yes, they are admired and liked not just for their looks, but it's still a major part of it)
take for example someone like emma watson --- she's 100% caucasian as far as i know, but still she doesn't look like a pale-white ghost she has a healthy normal looking skin color
[Image not found DB]
it's not TANNED but it's not pale either -- maybe she's using makeup, maybe it's the lighting --- i don't know - but why are so many these days pornstars bizarrely pinkish-chalk-white?
anyway, it's pointless to argue about preferences, i just wanted to understand this phenomenon better since i'm always curious when things like that change dramatically for seemingly no reason (that i know of)
but i don't feel i'm getting much closer to an answer
Posted - Jun 18 2022 : 11:10AM
feels to me like it was taken from a scene in a morgue in the show "CSI" or something (no offense to the girl of course or any other light skinned people - i'm light skinned myslef, but even light skinned people can use some make up to look less pale...)