Now that there is some authentic frontier gibberish.
That is a modern thing, derived from most jobs moving indoors - a mere 50-60 years ago, pale was what was “in”. Now, a tan means either “outdoorsy type” or “has enough time and money for vacations”.
I wonder how much of the taste for pale in other groups derives from still being more in the mindset of “tan = farm worker” and how much is linked to being bombarded by the message that “most of the most beautiful people in the world are paler than you” (ads, movies…), but at the same time I’m not sure whether the question is even relevant to anything other than, perhaps, a call for more variety in casting and ads.
I have always observed that many black women have the lack of nose bridge many white women go to the plastic surgeon to gain, granted they usually want a thinner tip on their reconstructed snooze.
Yep, and here in china it’s still like in the west 50-60 years ago. That is, manual workers are significantly darker on average than the general pop, and significantly poorer too. So no doubt there is some social aspect to why many people here want lighter-skin. Though it’s interesting it’s only really girls that want to be lighter.
But it’s also the case that most (female) celebrities are much lighter than the general pop. I’m not really sure what to conclude from that, because it’s also the case that female celebs here are crazy thin, much thinner than guys here appear to like IME. So it’s not as straightforward as looking at celebs and saying that’s what people find attractive.
ETA: A somewhat rambling post, but I stand by it.
That also happens in many other countries, specially with women whose job involves being in front of a camera. Very often, they look thin on screen but emaciated in person; many of them end up looking like they need a sandwich both off-camera and on.
That makes sense. I’ve always heard it said that “the camera adds ten pounds”; if true, then it follows that people who make themselves look good or worse thin on camera will likely be outright unhealthy looking in person.
Try being a Nordic person in Africa and you will quickly realize you are not the paragon of beauty you though. In areas with few white people, blonde hair is disturbing and connotes a malnourished child. Our colorless eyes are alien and inhuman looking, and overall we look creepy and unfinished.
Definitely true. I have 3 or 4 cameras pointed at me at all times.
Not really.
All the blonde Peace Corps volunteers I knew (and the other international workers, some of whom were actually Nordic, as in, from Sweden or Norway) had plenty of sexual/romantic attention, both wanted and unwanted. (That goes for both men and women, actually).
Adding to some of the topics floating around on thread. Not sure if these have changed or been debated since I read them.
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Blonde hair, blue eyes are novel physical traits. As long as a new trait doesn’t destroy symmetry or health then it sometimes is found to be sexually attractive. So Nordic people wouldn’t necessarily be more healthy looking but they could likely hold a novelty advantage.
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Very average or symmetrical faces are attractive. But for truly extraordinarily beautiful faces, say your 9s and 10s, a face needs to stray from somewhat average while maintaining the other health indicators.
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Certain traits sexual attractiveness do change from region to region (tan/not tan). However certain traits seem to be cross cultural. Facial symmetry, skin health and hip ratio(females) seem to matter for everyone.
I do think there are some overall aspects that all or most find attractive that are more prevalent in some races than others, but I’m unsure just how much of it is actually because of scientific objectivity, or just because of commonalities between culture.
For instance, lighter skin as more attractive is almost universal. I think a big part of this is cultural, in that darker skin will be more associated with lower class, particularly from working outdoors or other types of manual labor that ages the skin. So, to some extent, white people generally have the lightest skin, but that’s more or less accidental. I suspect as time goes on and less and less work is manual that that cultural aspect will fade.
There is, however, some scientific basis to lighter skin. Just a couple weeks ago I was watching an episode of Brain Games where they had two pictures of the same gender neutral face, the only difference was that they turned up the contrast on one and down on the other. Overwhelmingly, the one with higher contrast was seen as female and the one with lower contrast was seen as male. They weny on to talk about how this is part of how makeup “works”, increase contrast with eye liner and lipstick, etc. So, it seems like a natural extension that a fair-skinned woman would be more capable of having greater contrast in her features and, thus, be capable of appearing more feminine than a darker skinned woman. At the same time, though, this could possibly work against men, but maybe not necessarily.
I could also see some other particularly unique aspects of whites being seen as attractive just because of their rareness in other races, such as blonde or red hair, and green or blue eyes. But I’m not sold that those are universally seen as attractive as I know plenty of men and women who have varying preferences.
Back on cultural stuff though, I think the biggest factor is purely accidental in that western cultural is so dominant, particularly in the media. So we have major movie stars, musicians, and other pop culture icons, they’re overwhelmingly white, and we overwhelmingly export so much more than we import. For instance, the recent Transformers film had massive world-wide appeal, particularly in China, and even if you didn’t see the film, Michael Bay definitely has a particular stereotype of attractive young women he casts. Millions around the world saw that, and plenty of other media like it, and see them as an ideal for beauty. We import a significantly smaller number. Even of the foreign media we do import and is successful, it seems to not have as much of a focus on idealized beauty that Hollywood and major music labels here in the US export.
There is plenty of romantic attention, as you are a nice piece of rich, exotic, presumably sexually free, visa bait. And individuals always have preferences so you will now and then run into people who genuinely prefer whatever look. But there are places where white features and coloring generally are not considered objectively attractive.
Two things (that have most likely already been brought up). One, the article in the OP is actually a debunking of the assertion made in the OP, not in support of it. Two, on the broader question, my WAG would be colonialism to a certain extent. People with ‘Caucasian features’ (by which I’m guessing the OP means blonde hair and blue eyes, since there is a huge variance in ‘Caucasian features’) dominated the world for quite a while, and it was their tastes and preferences that were spread throughout the world, as well as their unified media that dominated (and to a certain extent still do), which meant that people throughout the world were bombarded with a Euro-centric view on what is or isn’t beauty and beautiful. I can remember when ‘Caucasian’ actors were used in roles meant to be, say, Asians or Hispanics, and when there were so few top notch black actors that you could count them on one hand. Things have changed, and I think this perception is starting to fade as other cultures become seen more in the various media, but I think this was a factor.
Or, the whole thing could be horseshit, which is what the article in the OP seems to be saying…at least from my skimming of it. 
From some reading I’ve done about how the golden ratio maps to the human body, for the grand majority of it, I couldn’t help but feel that the locations chosen on the face/body had more to do with where the golden ratio landed than because that point was meaningful biologically.
For example, let’s call the distance between a person’s eyes E[sub]1[/sub]. Parts of the face which could easily be the smaller iteration of the golden ratio from E[sub]1[/sub], which we’ll call E[sub]2[/sub], might be:
- The distance between the eyebrows
- The thickness of the bridge of the nose
- The thickness of the central crook of the nose
- The thickness of the bulb of the nose
Between those four, you’re going to find at least one which is pretty close to the golden ratio. But which is more likely, that the distance between the eyebrows is maximized for beauty (i.e. the golden ratio), or maximized for keeping water out of our eyes, when we’re in dangerous situations? Which is more likely, that the width of our nose is maximized for beauty, or maximized for the amount of air we need to inhale?
Say that it’s 1950 and the internet hasn’t been invented yet. As a European scientist of math and beauty, I analyze a bunch of Nordic faces and determine that the closest match to E[sub]2[/sub] among those who are voted to be beautiful is #4, the thickness of the bulb of the nose. I have now proven that beauty = a person who’s nose bulb is the smaller golden ratio of the distance between her eyes.
Later, in 2010, a new scientist decides to use these results to study a large sample of people, of varying ethnicities. They notice that when they test African and Eastern Asian peoples, the thickness of the bulb of the nose is wider than what the golden ratio would require, from the distance between their eyes. Since they have failed to hit the golden ratio, they must be less beautiful.
But of course that’s nonsense. If you had started with a bunch of Japanese people as your initial sample, you would have ended up selecting different places to put your measuring points than you did. You might have chosen option #3 for E[sub]2[/sub] instead of #4, since in your sample, that’s where the measurements would have matched the conclusion being sought.
I will grant that it is plausible that mankind likes the golden ratio, from a visual standpoint, and would have selected for some features that maintain it. But nothing I have seen has proved that point for any of the places selected as measuring points. The points look to be reverse engineered from the conclusion, instead of due to some evidence that those particular places defy the force of survival. If the belly button is generally around the golden ratio, as measured against our height standing, you first need to prove that this is not an issue of ideal location for locomotion, protection of vital organs, access to the circulatory system from an external body, and so on. Until you’ve done that, it’s just as plausible that the point of interest, from a golden ratio standpoint, might have been the bottom of the ribcage, the position of the stomach, the location of our nipples, or something else and we only landed on the navel as having significance because it was the one which matched our expectation the closest of all possible options.
Of course, there’s obviously an objective basis for light skin appeal because fairness tends to be associated with feminineness as well as youthfulness (since people are often fairer in complexion when they are young children and get darker as they mature). But as you pointed out, its appeal is greatly exaggerated by Eurocentricism.
Hard as it may be to believe, I came across a webpage while surfing the internet several years ago that talked about a study that was done on newborn babies that showed that they seemed to prefer brownish skin color and – much more surprisingly - another webpage presenting a study that showed a preference among newborns for the faces of white men and black women! I didn’t know what to make of them –particularly the last one- and of course they were easy to dismiss because there was no sign of a consensus in the sense of more studies confirming them. For the sake of providing citation, I have made a half-hearted attempt to find those exact pages (or at least similar ones) but gave up after a couple of minutes. I don’t think the issue is really that important.
The bottom line is, at the end of the day, skin color has only very limited relevance in beauty assessment and sexual attraction except as a marker of social status for people who are particularly obsessed with it. When it comes to raw physical attraction, what mostly matters is facial and body geometry and proportions as well as skin texture.
There are some things that seem to be taken as a given in this conversation that don’t make a whole lot of sense to me. But maybe I’m missing something.
If we are hardwired to associated light skin with female beauty, then why do so many people fawn over tan complexions nowadays? Doesn’t the existence of this phenomenon suggest that paleness, in fact, is not objectively more attractive than dark? To me, this contradicts that idea and only supports how fluid and changing people’s preferences can be when it comes to skin color.
Another data point is the high number of male-female pairings where the male is paler of the two. These pairings are growing as the prevalence of interracial relationships climbs. So again the question is raised: how is this finding consistent with light skin being aesthetically superior?
And third, in terms of attraction and natural selection, if human males were naturally inclined to seek pale-skinned mates, one must really wonder why there are so many dark-skinned people on the planet. Without seeing how skin color distributes across the human species, I can’t say this definitively, but I wouldn’t be surprised if our complexion spectrum follows a bell curve with roughly the same numbers of very dark and very pale. And if there was skewing, I would guess that the darker side would have the excess. So whatever extent that lighter skin might inherently impart an aesthetic advantage, it doesn’t seem to translate into any evolutionary advantage. Which means it is probably not a consequential factor in human behavior.
This question of significance also relates to female body preferences, and not just as it relates to the racial topic at hand. The 0.7 waist-to-hip ratio that is presented as the universal ideal apparently hasn’t led to the “extinction” of narrow-hipped women who look more like apples and bananas than hour glasses and pears. And as much as boobs are sought after, the abundance of small-chested women also suggests that voluptiousness comes no where close to being a dealbreaker, either. It’s clear to me our preferences don’t seem to track very closely with what our mates look like, and the “ideal phenotype” is usually much less common than other phenotypes.
So perspective might be order. Yes, there are some things that lots of people (maybe even everyone) likes. But on a practical level, this agreement means very little since considerable concessions are made for people who deviate from these “ideals”.
This seems to be an inherently indeterminate chicken-and-egg sequence, but if I had to guess I would say it goes in reverse.
[ol]
[li]Wearing makeup is more attractive.[/li][li]Women focus on being attractive more than men do.[/li][li]Therefore, women wear makeup more than men do.[/li][li]Therefore, the “makeup” look is associated with feminine appearance.[/li][/ol]
Since when is makeup restricted to women? It’s a bug world out there, and plenty of it involves men wearing make up. Check out the Wodaabe for one noteable example.
Since when does “more than men do” mean “restricted to women”?
One theory would say that men are less likely to wear makeup that makes their lips look like their vulva. Not that it matters in this case. It is fair to say that lighter skin provides a better canvas for makeup in some ways.