Other thing I forgot to mention, in that thing about fantasy “races” vs. the real world concept of races, RE: the interracial elf couple. Namely, the green-haired elf also has green-tinted skin, while the blue-haired one has blue-tinted, because elves, like trees in the autumn, use a carotenoid, bright yellow pigment, instead of melanin (a dark yellow or orange pigment), as photoprotection. Which makes him something like an elven POC, since he has the equivalent of brown skin.
Elves have bluish skin, with or without yellow pigment that changes it to greenish, due to structural coloring like in blue-skinned monkeys. When the bluish-skinned race of elves ‘tan’, they actually turn greenish. Though it might not actually make sense for them to be the less-pigmented one, since they live up with the shiny ice while the green people live down in the shady trees. Fuck it one’s green and the other’s blue and maybe their current lifestyles weren’t the ancestral ones, and it just hasn’t been enough generations to change them.
The ‘dark’ elves—who are not physically darker-colored than other elves, it’s metaphorical darkness—have deep crimson hair, and purplish skin, because they use a red anthocyanin pigment, rather than a carotenoid. For reasons. The blue hair of the other bluish-skinned elven race is also anthocyanin, with a different pH in the hair follicles’ equivalents of melanocytes. The green-haired elves have yellow carotenoids there, along with blue anthocyanins.
The pigments in the blue- and green-haired elves’ eyes, which are usually yellow and orange respectively, are carotenoids, while the pigment in the crimson-haired elves’ eyes is actually a very pale blue anthocyanin, with the main color of the eye being the default white of the sclera—my elves don’t have ‘whites of their eyes’, since with their +2 to Perception they can track each other’s pupils alone, just fine.
