Well, shouldn’t they? Do they ever explain why they don’t?
Spock smash puny Kirk!
Human blood is blue, but that doesn’t make us have blue skin.
But we humans don’t have red skin!
From what I’ve seen, Vulcans have a very pale, almost yellowish or greenish cast to their skin, and no pink hues at all; I assume this is the way to show their different physiology. If they have the ability to blush, they should go kind of greenish when they do.
And their pimples are…?
Wait, what?
Assuming you aren’t whooshing me - no it’s not. It darkens when deoxygenated, but it never become blue. “Blue veins” are largely an artifact of how light wavelengths differentially penetrates skin vs. blood, combined with the relative depth of blood vessels.
They do.
Spock was supposed to be greenish, and in some early shots it’s very noticeable. The Network heads didn’t like it, and had Roddenberry tone it down.
Look at him in Where No Man Has Gone Before: he’s about as green as grass.
Actually, yes we do, sort of. So much so, caucasian women put “blush” on their cheeks to simulate what it looks like when they blush.
But I think your point is that skin pigments don’t have to allow you to see the color of the fluid in the capillaries (as is obviously the case in sub-Saharan Africans, for example).
Maybe yours is, but everyone’s I’ve ever seen has been in the range from cherry red (CO poisoning) to dark maroon (most venous blood).
And I’ve seen a lot of blood.
But perhaps not that of actual royalty, I admit.
Yup. That’s why I noted that a blushing Vulcan would probably appear more greenish. But we’re not red most of the time!
Vulcans never blush.
:dubious:
Yes humans do have red skin… That is one of the reasons why we cannot have red screens. We can have blue screens and green screens but not red because its to close to skin tone.
Newsflash! Straight Dope poster outs himself as an alien! Posting history explained!
In the book Coneheads, it notes that due to the color of their blood (dark blue IIRC) the Cono Sapien penis becomes bluish when erect. I imagine the erect Vulcan penis would be greenish for the same reason.
I can see how their skin isn’t green, but how come their tongues and the insides of their mouths aren’t green?
This bothered me (uh, and it’s always something small and dumb like this, not major issues of plot or physics) in the latest Star Trek movie, when young Spock got himself beat up, and has green blood on his very red split lip.
I decided not to worry about it. No doubt a matter of alien physiology that I just don’t understand.
Or it’s some physiology he got from his human mother.
Well, they might have hemocyanin in their blood (copper-based oxygen carrying molecule in the blood,) but yet somehow still use myoglobin (iron-based oxygen carrying molecule in muscles) in their muscle tissue. Though I don’t know if that would even be possible…but it could help to explain, at least a little bit, why the inside of their mouths and lips are red, not blueish green.