Behold, yet another question whose answer can be found in thr Trade Skill Sticky!
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Skinning is interesting as a gathering skill. For one thing, the typical "orange means always" rule does not apply. I have found that the skinning-skill-ups work like on a point system. Every skill level you reach, you need a certain number of points to get to the next level. Orange gives you the most, while green gives the least (excluding grey, which is none). What does this mean? By the time you get over 150 skill, you'll notice that you are not getting skill-ups from skinning orange-colored beasts. It will take anywhere from 2-12 orange-labeled beasts to get another point.
This is done, I believe, to scale skinning to other gathering skills. If you got a point for every orange-beast skinned, you'd level up even faster than you already do (literally, you could skill up to 300 within an hour or two, at most)! Face it: skinning is ridiculously easy to level, especially compared to mining. Herbalism is somewhere in the middle; but even with the "point system" (my own phrasing), skinning is the easiest gathering ability to skill up.