“Dark Elves are the dark-skinned, red-eyed Elven peoples of Morrowind. The ‘dark’ part may come from their dark grey skin, but it also fits their gloomy dispositions. Folks call them 'Dark Elf’ in the West, but they call themselves the 'Dunmer.'” —Dialogue from Morrowind
There’s more diversity in skin tone than people think.
I’m just gonna start at the beginning and go through the games to show what I mean. This is both an artist resource and evidence that it’s perfectly fine to create Dunmer characters with skin tones other than “grey.”
Here’s the Dunmer from Arena:
You couldn’t choose any other skin tone, so the color palette of midtone, shadow, and highlight looks like this:
Daggerfall’s Dunmer:
Still no option to change skin color so our palette is still really simple:
Battlespire’s Dunmer:
(Thank the gods the male Dunmer is wearing pants.)
Still only one skin tone, but the male Dunmer seems to have slightly lighter skin than the female Dunmer, so here’s our palettes:
Redguard’s Dunmer:
It’s a terrible picture, but it’s the only one I could find. Here’s his palette:
Morrowind’s Dunmer:
There’s still no option to change skin color, but it looks like the male Dunmer has slightly darker skin than the female Dunmer. Here’s the palettes:
I couldn’t find any good pictures of Dunmer from Shadowkey, but here’s the female and male Dunmer profile pictures:
Their skin tone is close enough to have the same color palette:
Now we’re at Oblivion, which is where things get nuts. Oblivion was the first TES game which allowed you to choose your own skin tone. Unfortunately, the slider system was so messed up, that you could eventually get any skin tone with any race. I once accidentally made my Redguard character bright, fire-truck red. Somehow. Skin tones are literally infinite.
My solution for figuring out canon Oblivion skin tones was to look at all the Dunmer NPCs and figure out their skin tones. I used every NPC for which I could find a good screenshot, which ended up being almost every single Dunmer NPC. Their individual palettes are in the bottom right corner of their pictures.
As you can see, the range of skin tones is extensive. Very few of them could be described as simply “grey.” Just to illustrate my point, I took the mid-tone for each NPC and sorted them all by hue. Here’s the results:
That’s basically a desaturated rainbow. @cliff–racer has a headcanon I really like which explains the sudden wide variety of Dunmer skin tones in Cyrodiil as the result of mixed races. Cyrodiil would be the place with the greatest opportunity for mixed race children, so it makes sense.
Moving on to Skyrim:
Skyrim has five skin tones, but they’re all very similar. Here’s the mid-tones in order by lightness:
After the wide variety available in Oblivion, Skyrim’s selection is kind of disappointing. Even if they didn’t want to give us purple and green and blue Dunmer, at the very least they could have gone darker. I always end up choosing the fourth or fifth option simply because all the other ones look whitewashed.
Elder Scrolls Online was kind enough to provide its own color palette:
Here’s what they look like on my buddy Tel here:
The top row seems to have a slightly tan undertone, and the bottom row has a slightly blue-green undertone.
The depiction of Dunmer skin color in The Elder Scrolls: Legends is nearly as varied as it is in Oblivion. There’s many pictures where skin color is just a flat grey, or where the art is so stylized, or the lighting is so intense that skin color isn’t discernible, but here’s a selection of closeups of Dunmer cards in which skin color is more easily seen:
And here’s some I wasn’t even sure were originally drawn to be Dunmer even though it says “Dark Elf” on the card:
Here’s the mid-tones for the Legends Dunmer sorted by hue:
Just look at that desaturated rainbow!
The changing of the color of the Dunmer’s skin is a major piece of cultural lore. It’s part of what changed them, as a people, from the Chimer into the Dunmer. Azura cursed them to have grey skin and red eyes after Almsivi broke their promise to Nerevar and used Kagrenac’s tools to become living gods. Almsivi reframed the transformation to become a point of pride, and their skin color became a religious symbol.
"Velothi, your skin has become the pregnant darkness. My brooding has brought this on. Remember that Boethiah asked you to become the color of bruise. How else to show yourselves people of the exodus into the vital: pain?” — Vivec speaking in the 36 Lessons of Vivec, Sermon 32
“The color of bruise” is a significant phrase, because bruises aren’t just grey. Bruises are purple and blue and brown and green. Make your Dunmer colorful! It’s part of their cultural heritage!
All images are either my own screenshots or taken from @uesp‘s website.
