“Fake Tan” or “Fake News”?

Abstract

We estimated Trump’s skin colour from 70 internet images and also from the “twitter tan line” image (February 8, 2020; Twitter). We then compared the estimated skin colours with two existing data sets of skin colours: the range of skin tans that occur naturally in the Caucasian population and the range skin colours brought about by a sunless tan. We find that Trump’s skin colour is close to the edge of the natural skin tan gamut and firmly within the gamut of a sunless skin tan. The skin colour above Trump’s tan line is outside of the naturally occurring range of skin colours, even outside the skin tan of nonmelanized albinos. The latter finding is consistent with the hypothesis that part of the image may have been digitally distorted.