Pasty means unhealthily pale, or like uncooked dough. A pasty face, pasty complexion, pasty white.
Of a face it means pale in a way that suggests illness or too much time indoors, and it is unkind. Of a texture it means thick, soft and unpleasantly sticky. Note the other pasty, pronounced differently, which is the Cornish pasty — a folded pastry case with a crimped edge, which has protected status and was made for miners to hold by the crust.
1adjectivepastyUnhealthily pale.
“After a long winter indoors, he looked pasty and tired.”
2adjectivethickThick and sticky like dough.
“Add a little more water if the mixture becomes too pasty to stir.”
pasty is a quality of paleness or stickiness.
Paste plus -y, from Latin pasta, dough. The Cornish pasty comes from the same Latin by a different route, through Old French paste.
Middle English
paste
English
paste
English, today
pasty
Built from
From paste + y. paste comes from Middle English paste. From Middle English paste, from Old French paste (modern pâte), from Latin pasta, from Ancient Greek παστά. a doublet of pasta. The verb is from the noun. Middle English - had pasten (“to make a paste of; bake in a pastry”), also from the noun; compare Latin pistō and Medieval Latin pastillātus.
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA