The present invention relates to a method of detecting a skin-colored area using a variable skin color model. In the method, an initial skin-colored area is extracted from an input image using a skin color model, the initial skin-colored area being repeatedly extracted by adjusting a threshold value, which is a criterion for the selection of a skin-colored area, until a ratio of size of the extracted skin-colored area to size of the entire input image becomes less than a predetermined value. A skin-colored area is extracted by applying the threshold value determined in the first stage to the skin color model, the skin color model being modified by analyzing characteristics of object regions and noise regions of the skin-colored area. The skin-colored area detection method can obtain a high skin-colored object detection rate and a high false alarm rate even under various lighting and background conditions.