Can a camera see past skintone? Angélica Dass, the artist who matched thousands of faces to Pantone colors, is shooting 100 portraits to find out

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For most of photographic history, the camera didn't treat every human skin tone equally. Early references cards featured only white women, and so chemical emulsions and exposure standards were optimized for those skin tones. Pictures of darker skinned people, in turn, were often underexposed, poorly balanced or lacking distinct facial features.

Kodak finally introduced multiracial reference cards in the mid-1990s, just as digital photography was emerging. This new tech did not, though, automatically fix the problem. The same historical biases were simply coded directly into the new sensors, algorithms and editing software.

It's only recently that true fixes have starting arriving, led by Google's Real Tone, introduced in 2021, with other smartphone makers quickly following suit.

Among them were Chinese brand TECNO, whose Universal Tone technology officially began launched in October 2023.