Should Vulcans be greener?

in TOS Spock has a light greenish hue to him because of his green blood. Since he is half Vulcan shouldn't full Vulcans be more green than he is? Gosh, I hope this doesn't sound racist!

 

Spock looks especially sickly-green in the alternate version of WNMHGB.

But I don't think Vulcans should be overly green, unless their equivalent of melanin has a lot of green pigment in it. Human skin tones are not the exact same color as human blood, after all.

Perhaps their lips and gums should be green.

Kor

 

Spock's blood is as green as any other Vulcan's, and apparently it's mostly Vulcan in chemistry, since Sarek was able to receive a transfusion from Spock (albeit with some "human elements" filtered out). Since iron-based and copper-based blood chemistry are incompatible, it wouldn't make sense for his blood to be a blend of both. (Indeed, it's implausible that Amanda could even have carried him, since mother and fetus share blood. Perhaps he was artificially gestated, although there have been attempts in tie-ins to handwave some kind of biological workaround for that.)

However, it may have been the original intention for full Vulcans to be greener, or more alien. Note that in "Mudd's Women," Harry could tell Spock was "part-Vulcanian" just by looking at him, which implies that he looked more human than a full "Vulcanian" would. (Which would fit with Spock's line in "The Corbomite Maneuver" about the Scary Balok Puppet looking like his father.) But then "Balance of Terror" required the Romulans to look like Spock so he could be suspected of being a spy, so that idea was evidently dropped or forgotten.

 

Yes. No. Maybe. Who cares.

 

If I were in charge of that remastering job done on the show ten years ago I would have insisted that in Patterns of Force in the scenes where Spock appears topless his nipples be given a green tint.

 

Good points. Since he seemed to have almost complete Vulcan blood that would mean he is very similar to other Vulcans and was as green as other Vulcans. However, I still think it would have been cool if they had made full blooded Vulcans a little more green to emphasize Spock was a hybrid.

 

He was goldish, not green. That was the intention. Should he be "golder"? No.

 

He was greenish-gold, in fact. Here's an item on the makeup color that was custom-designed for Nimoy to wear as Spock, "LN-1" (which has been used for Vulcans ever since). Apparently it's similar to Kirk's command tunic in that it appears greener to the naked eye than it does when photographed.

 

Maybe I need to adjust the color on my TV set.

 

Yes, Leonard Nimoy's Spock makeup was more yellowish than green. His skin color never looked really green to me on TV.

As a side note, the in-universe rationale for Vulcans having green blood is that their hemoglobin (or Vulcan equivalent) is based on copper rather than iron. In fact, many species of mollusks and arthropods have a protein called hemocyanin in their blood, which uses copper as its oxygen-binding element. However, it's an inefficient carrier of oxygen and would never work in a warm-blooded vertebrate.

 

^Also, those species have blue blood, not green. I tend to assume that Vulcan blood has some kind of yellow component along with the blue.

 

Yellowish-green that's true. But whatever color he was I still think pure blooded Vulcans should have looked different than Spock given the fact that he was a Vulcan-Human hybrid.

 

And that does seem to have been the original intention, going by "Mudd's Women" and the original series prospectus (which said he had alien features because he was "probably half-Martian"). But they seem to have forgotten or abandoned it, perhaps because it was simpler just to use the makeup they were already experienced with applying to Nimoy.

Of course, there's no guarantee that a hybrid will end up looking "in between." Some children of a mixed-ethnicity couple can look more like their father while others look more like their mother. I've even heard of one or two cases of fraternal twins where one looks black and the other looks white. Spock looks fully Vulcan, but it's possible that some other human-Vulcan hybrid might look almost entirely human.

 

Full Vulcans should have been purple, just to throw viewers off.

Or is there a reason why their equivalent to melanin couldn't be purple while their blood is green?

Kor

 

Given how Star Trek is visual entertainment, we might just as well deduce that the difference between Spock and a full Vulcan is easily discernible but not visual. Remember how Vulcans feel about the smell of humans? If Mudd can sense said smell but sees pointed ears and greenish lips, he is justified in jumping into conclusions.

This regardless of whether full Vulcans have a distinct smell of their own (which their own noses are more or less incapable of detecting), or have virtually no perspiration and therefore much less in the way of body odor. Either of these would be noted but dismissed by all those primitive Earthlings or random aliens to whom Spock tries to pass himself as human, but Mudd would be a child of the 23rd century and know better.

Timo Saloniemi

 

Those are very good points. I know some mix raced people and some favor one race more than the other. Spock does look Vulcan and I agree another Human-Vulcan hybrid may favor the Human side in looks and behavior. That would be an interesting concept to examine in a show/character!

 

The TNG Romulans tended to look more uniform in skin-color than Vulcans, whose makeup was pretty inconsistent (including for Spock of course).

 

I don't recall any mention in Trek TOS of Vulcans thinking that humans have a particular smell. Is that from one of the later Trek incarnations?

Since Vulcans are exclusively vegetarian and most humans in the 23rd century probably still eat animal products, maybe Vulcans think humans smell like meat -- or cheese.

Vulcan physiology will have evolved to conserve water as much as possible in the hot, dry environment of their native planet. So Vulcans probably don't sweat much, if at all. Maybe they cool their body temperature by panting like dogs.