It's surprisingly easy to turn a dark, orange-looking skin texture into very pale skin, or even goth. Netherworks showed me how to do it when he was testing something. Typically, ambient is set to black under the skin (0 RGB). Set it just a touch lighter than black and add a very small amount of blue. You'll see a major difference and using ambient really brings out the details in the texture. Real skin is translucent -- you can see through it, to a certain degree. Adding a little ambient underneath a skin texture emulates that nicely. And then if you want to do a render in some harsh white or daylight, setting the ambient back to black will make that darker texture look good and keep the image from appearing overexposed. But, if the texture itself is very white, this cant be done. And setting the underlying object color to a darker tone doesnt have the same effect.

I'll post an example. Err... Naked people. Fair warning.