Word: pigmentation
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1930-1939
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...possible to enter the museum library and spend a little time with the four watercolors which are now being shown, one by Hopper and the remaining three by Sargent. The Hopper landscape serves only to heighten my belief in the excellence of the artist; the solid buildings, the clear pigment, and the clean spaciousness within which each part of the painting exists, are the work of a master painter. No element in Hopper's piece is created "in vacuo"; the houses, mountains, and the water are each related to the other in a very real sense...
What does make darker races darker is a larger proportion of fine, microscopic granules of black melanin scattered throughout the upper layers of their skin. In upper skin layers melanin disintegrates, turns into melanoid, the other pigment discovered in the skin by Drs. Edwards and Duntley. Everybody has some melanin and melanoid in his skin, but blonds have less than brunets, white women less than white men, white races less than dark races...
Anatomists have long held that white skins are tinted by three pigments: melanin, a black chemical; hemoglobin, a reddish substance which colors the blood; oxyhemoglobin, a form of hemoglobin in combination with oxygen. They also believed that Negroes and Orientals are darker than Caucasians partly because of the presence of some special, unknown pigment in their skins...
Besides melanin and both hemoglobins, said the scientists, a yellow pigment, carotene, is found in the upper layers of all human skin. Carotene, a component of sweet potatoes, corn, butter, carrots and milk, is responsible for the yellowish palms, soles and eyelids of white persons. But although a white person may acquire a pale yellow tinge all over by eating enormous amounts of carotene, carotene is not what makes Orientals yellow. Normal persons of all races have roughly the same amounts of carotene...
From the rods of fresh-water fishes, he extracted the vitamin-nature of the substance now called vitamin A-2. From chicken retina he obtained the first light-sensitive pigment to be found in these structures...