Why Skin Tones Matter in Ballet Shoes: A Guide for Every Dancer

Ballet shoes have always been pink. Here's why that's finally changing, and why skin-tone matching benefits every dancer, not just some.

Look at any ballet class from the past hundred years and you'll notice something: everyone's wearing the same color shoe. Pink. Not because it matches every dancer's skin (it doesn't), but because that's the way ballet has always been done.

For generations, dancers whose skin didn't match traditional pink had a choice. Either wear a shoe that didn't match their body, or spend hours before every class and performance altering their shoes by hand. Neither was a real solution.

Now that's changing. Skin-tone ballet shoes are becoming standard, not a niche option. This is a guide to why that shift matters, what it means for your dancer, and how to think about choosing a shade that actually matches.

In this post:

1. The line of the leg (why matching matters at all)
2. A brief history of pink ballet shoes
3. The pancaking problem
4. When skin-tone ballet shoes started to exist
5. Why skin-tone matching benefits every dancer
6. How to think about your shade
7. A note from Jaya

The line of the leg (why matching matters at all)

Ballet is a visual discipline. Every position, every extension, every leap is shaped by the line of the dancer's body from head to fingertip to toe. The costume, the tights, the shoes are all designed to disappear into that line, not interrupt it.

That's the reason ballet shoes have always been color-matched to skin in the first place. If your shoe blends into your foot, and your tights blend into your leg, the eye sees one continuous line. If any element clashes, the eye stops there, and the dancer's line is broken.

For a long time, "matching" meant one specific pale pink, applied to every dancer regardless of what their skin actually looked like. The aesthetic goal was universal, that unbroken line, but the product served only a narrow slice of who was doing the dancing. The problem wasn't the aesthetic. The problem was that the industry stopped short of solving it for everyone.

A brief history of pink ballet shoes

Pink ballet shoes became the standard in Western ballet during the 1800s and early 1900s, when the art form was codified in Europe and Russia. At the time, professional ballet dancers were almost exclusively white and European, and pale pink was chosen to complement the skin tone of the average dancer in that setting.

For over a century, that was that. Pink was the default in every school, every company, every dancewear store. The convention outlasted the demographic that shaped it. As ballet spread across the world, and as dancers of every background joined the tradition, pink stayed.

The result: generations of dancers whose skin didn't resemble the traditional pink shoe were left to figure it out on their own. Some brands added a "flesh" shade in the 1990s and 2000s, but "flesh" almost always meant one specific tan tone, not a real range. A dancer with deeper skin, with warmer or cooler undertones, or with skin somewhere in between, still had no match.

That began to change more meaningfully in the 2010s, when major dance companies and some dancewear brands started expanding shade offerings. It's still an ongoing shift. The industry is catching up, slowly, to what dancers have needed all along.

The pancaking problem

When your shoe doesn't come in your shade, the solution dancers developed was pancaking: painting the shoe with foundation, fabric dye, or acrylic paint to match the skin.

Pancaking is a real skill. Dancers pass down techniques from teacher to student. The most careful pancakers can get results that look almost right on stage. But the process itself is grueling:

• Hours of application, sometimes multiple coats
• Repeated touch-ups because the paint or foundation wears off during rehearsal
• Streaky results that never quite match the leg
• Foundation and dye that transfer onto tights, onto floors, onto costumes
• Shoes that wear out faster because the finish coats add stiffness
• A constant cost in time, energy, and materials before every performance

And here's the honest part: even after all that work, pancaked shoes rarely look truly finished. They look almost right. Almost matched. Close, but not clean.

The dance community has had this conversation for decades. What was missing was a product answer. Skin-tone ballet shoes exist now because the demand was always there. The industry just took a long time to hear it.

When skin-tone ballet shoes started to exist

Major dancewear brands began adding wider shade ranges in the late 2010s, often starting with just two or three additional tones added to their standard pink lineup. Ballet companies also began issuing skin-tone shoes to their corps de ballet, and organizations like Dance Theatre of Harlem had been advocating for this for decades before it reached the mainstream.

The progress has been real but uneven. Even now, some brands offer skin-tone shoes only in limited sizes or in select shoe styles. A dancer with a foot outside standard sizes, or looking for a specific style, often still can't find their shade.

Jaiyah exists to close that gap. Six shades, from Cacao at the deepest to Pearl at the lightest. Every size, from a preschooler's first ballet class through adult men and women. Every shade available in every size. No dancer gets treated as an afterthought.

Why skin-tone matching benefits every dancer

Skin-tone ballet shoes are often talked about as being for dancers of color, and that's partly true. Dancers with deeper skin have felt the mismatch most acutely and for the longest time. But skin-tone matching is universal. It benefits every dancer.

Traditional pink ballet shoes are a very specific pale pink undertone. That undertone genuinely matches a small percentage of the dancer population, and that's it. A dancer with warm honey undertones, cool porcelain skin, olive skin, deep brown skin, or anywhere in between is not served by "pink" as a default.

When your shoe matches your actual skin, the aesthetic ballet has always been chasing (that continuous line from hip to floor) finally works for you. The shoe disappears into your body. The line stays clean. Your technique gets to be the thing people see.

This is what skin-tone ballet shoes offer that pink never really did. Not just inclusion, but the actual visual result the entire tradition has been built around.

How to think about your shade

Once you understand why matching matters, the next question is how to actually find your shade. A few things to know:

• Undertones matter. Look at your skin in natural light and decide whether you lean warm (yellow, gold, olive undertones) or cool (pink, red, blue undertones). Some shades are warmer than others.
• Match to your leg, not your arm. Ballet shoes sit at the foot and the visual line runs up your leg. Your leg is where the match needs to work, and legs are often a slightly different tone than arms or faces.
• Match under normal light, not stage light. Stage lighting changes color perception dramatically. Match your shoe in daylight or standard indoor lighting.
• If between shades, go slightly deeper. A shade that's a touch darker than your skin reads as "clean line" more often than a shade that's a touch lighter, which can look pale or washed-out.

We wrote a full guide to choosing your shade from the Jaiyah lineup that walks through each of the six colors and who they typically suit best. If you're not sure, start there.

A note from Jaya

I trained in ballet, but I don't consider myself a ballerina. I'm a modern and contemporary dancer (I'll write more about what that means in a future post), well-rounded and multifaceted, and my shoes have to work for more than one style. That's part of why I built Jaiyah the way I did.

Here's why this matters to me:

In every sport, every physical discipline, you need equipment made for your body in order to succeed at even the bare minimum level. In dance, the main thing is aesthetic. We quite literally look at ourselves in the mirror with a critical eye through every hour of every class of every year of our training. And the bare minimum should be that you at least like how you look.

For too long, it's been normalized to accept "nude" or "pink" as the standard, even though it's not actually anyone's standard. It didn't match me, and eventually I found out it didn't really match my friends either, from deep tones to light. Nobody liked how they looked in traditional pink. We were all just used to it.

I also got tired of pancaking. Not just because it took forever, but because after all that time and effort, the shoes still didn't really look right. Streaky, uneven, kind of tacky, honestly. A long messy process for a result that never felt finished.

As a professional, I realized this problem didn't stop at the shoes. Undergarments wouldn't match me either. But it began at the shoes. The shoes are the part everyone sees. I decided to make my own instead of waiting for someone else to solve my problem.

Now that ballet is becoming more inclusive, let's actually include everyone by giving every dancer their basic needs to succeed in class. Six shades. Every size. No more pancaking. For us and for the dancers coming up next.

If you like pink, no shade to you. But not I.

Ready to find your shade?

Ballet is changing. Slowly, in some places faster than others, the industry is finally offering dancers of every skin tone the same basic thing dancers have always needed: a shoe that matches their body.

Jaiyah is part of that change. Six skin-tone shades. Every size from kids to adult women and men. No dancer left as an afterthought.

If you're new to skin-tone ballet shoes and want to figure out which of ours is right for you, read our guide to choosing your Jaiyah shade next. And if you haven't yet, our guide to how a ballet shoe should fit is a good place to start before you buy.

Shop the full Jaiyah collection →