Mystery unsolved: What is the color of Cristiano Ronaldo's tan?

As any loyal reader of FC Yahoo knows by now, this is a serious and highfalutin journalistic outfit that doesn’t indulge in gossip and speaks truth to power. We follow in the muckraking tradition. Our belief in the crucial role of the press in a democracy and the sanctity of the Fourth Estate is firm.

And so it is, quite frankly, a miracle that we haven’t won a Pulitzer yet. Especially after our coverage of players getting sent off for farting, Cristiano Ronaldo chucking a TV reporter’s mic in a pond live on air and an Icelandic TV announcer squealing at his Viking audience.

Today, we bring you another investigation, reported over the course of many months. We fully expect a Spotlight-esque movie to be made of what you are about to read below.

Our journey began with a simple question: What color even is Ronaldo now?

On Thursday, he posted a picture of him flexing by a swimming pool – because when Ronaldo isn’t playing soccer, he’s flexing by a swimming pool – on Instagram. As usual, it had more than a million likes within an hour. And as usual, it had a highly literate caption.

But it raised an alarming question about the way we live now in our modern, 21st-century society.

We’ve never seen anything quite like the color that Ronaldo has taken these days, in the wake of a season in which the 31-year-old forward won both the Champions League with Real Madrid and Euro 2016 with Portugal. Maybe it’s simply the color of winning.

We weren’t satisfied with that answer, though. We wanted to define it. Plainly, he’s gone several shades past orange. Because his shorts – rolled up to show off his quads – are orange, and he’s much past that. If he were a paint color, he would probably be called Chocolate Milk. Yet that doesn’t quite cover it either.

Maybe the color is called Instagram Filter, judging by the apparent darkening of his teeth. But even if his tan was exaggerated a tad, it’s still a startlingly unhuman color.

Is it purple?

We fully expect this picture to become like that dress, where people argued endlessly over whether it was white and gold or blue and black (correct answer: white and gold).

Watch this space as we continue our five-part series on the scientific explanation of Ronaldo’s tan.

Leander Schaerlaeckens is a soccer columnist for Yahoo Sports. Follow him on Twitter @LeanderAlphabet.