CHATEAU HEARTISTE: Beauty Is Objective, Fair-Skinned, And White-ish. “The first thing that jumps out at you is just how similar very beautiful women look. Beautiful women from all races resemble each other more than they resemble the uglies of their own races. The big wide-set eyes, the bright smiles, the good teeth, the high foreheads and cheekbones, the dainty noses…. it’s almost as if there’s a universal objective standard of beauty that exists in the world inhabited by humans!”

Perhaps the most interesting thing in this post is a link to a recent post by Peter Frost, “Perception of skin color in sub-Saharan Africa”:

Women are in fact lighter-skinned than men throughout the world . . . Girls become lighter-skinned than boys from puberty onward, apparently as part of sexual maturation. . . . This post-pubescent lightening correlates in girls with the post-pubescent thickening of subcutaneous fat . . . [and] with the digit ratio—a marker of the degree of prenatal estrogenization . . .

This sexual dimorphism is paralleled by a traditional tendency to associate women with the lighter end of the local spectrum of complexions. Hence, the ideal woman was said to be “white” in Europe and East Asia, “golden” in South-East Asia, and “red” in sub-Saharan Africa.

The term “red” may puzzle non-Africans. It actually means a reddish-brown-orange complexion, which is the lightest color that occurs locally in normal individuals.