Thank you for a good point. I am in the middle of editing my first novel; I have been taking the approach of minimal physical descriptions of characters and leaving out skin, hair, and eye color with the idea that this leaves more opening to allow multiple groups to identify with the characters. This article is making me rethink this, I may not change my approach, but I am going to think about how much description of characters and what to describe.

Just for information, the novel setting is a society where body modification is common, to the point where physical appearance and gender are personal choices. Because of this, there are pronouns for indeterminate gender persons as well as male, female and non-gendered. So the lack of description of skin, hair and eye color was flowing from the “it just doesn’t matter because it could change tomorrow” attitude I have set up for the society.