white writer- how to describe skin color?

If this is not an appropriate post, please let me know immediately so I can take it down. I do not want to contribute anything unintentionally negative in this wonderful community.

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I am writing a fantasy story, that is matriarchal and also, I decided, is going to be mostly including POC. However, I don't want to fall into the whole terrible mindset of "white until proven otherwise", so I'm trying to describe skin tones of all the different lovely shades of the peoples in my book. It's hard, as I can't use the regions that the earthly equivalent of their look would be (for example, the main charachter would be "Eastern Indian" but I can't describe it like that, since there's no India in this world.)

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I know that WOC are often fetishized for their skin colors, and when I've been looking online on "how to describe skin tones" it's just a bunch of white people talking about "how black people don't like ___" and "black people don't like ____", yet somehow still advising to describe tones like: honey brown, chocolate, coffee, etc. which I know from lurking here is a huge no and fetishizing the color of the skin.

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Would anyone mind giving me advice on how to navigate these waters? There's a huge theme of the importance of nature in the book, but it just doesn't seem all that eloquent or right to say she had "a deep clay color about her skin, punctuated by the glistening ink slick of hair." Or "she looked and smelled like the richest earth, deeply grounded and ever glistening with the life she contained."

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I keep going back to dirt for some reason, because I've always appreciated the different colors of earth, but I don't think that's the best way to describe it...

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Also: I have eastern Asian. But I'll be including other Asian ethnicities as well, I know y'all are some of the least represented. This isn't excluding you, if you have advice on how to describe the various shades and featured that you tend to have, I really need to hear that advice too!