Why Skin Classification Systems Keep Failing Melanin-Rich Skin

Skin classification systems keep failing melanin-rich skin because they begin with the wrong question. Most frameworks ask what skin looks like; its color, tone, or proximity to a white baseline rather than how it behaves under stress, injury, and time.

This work refuses that logic. Instead of ranking appearance, it centers memory: how skin remembers inflammation, trauma, environmental exposure, and survival. Melanin is not a cosmetic variable or a deviation from neutrality. It is a responsive biological system with intelligence of its own. Until skin science learns to listen to that intelligence, new scales will continue to reproduce the same harm under different names.