The automated detection of humans in computer vision as well as the realistic rendering of people in computer graphics necessitates improved modeling of the human skin color. In this paper we describe the acquisition and modeling of skin reflectance data densely sampled over the entire visible spectrum. The data collected through a spectrograph allows us to explain skin color (and its variations) and to discriminate between human skin and dyes designed to mimic human skin. We study the approximation of these data using several sets of basis functions. Our study shows that skin reflectance data can best be approximated by a linear combination of Gaussians or their first derivatives. This result has a significant practical impact on optical acquisition devices: the entire visible spectrum of skin reflectance can now be captured with a few filters of optimally chosen central wavelengths and bandwidth.