If skin lightening is used by females to appear more feminine, then why are black men like Sammy Sosa and Vybz Kartel bleaching their skin as well? Or is this just some sort of Carribean trend?

Russell's most recent research found the contrast was a pointer to youth. Doug Jones found that, in women, youthful facial shape was correlated with percieved attractiveness, and that women models in magazines had facial proportions of seven year olds.

It seems to me that girls' skin gets noticeably less light once they are out of their teens. So, couldn't skin, lip and eye area contrast, and feminine facial features, all be aspects of female appearance that function as signals of youth. Under sexual selection of women there could have been competition for an appearance that displayed such signals especially strongly. Thus leading to adult women being perceived as attractive even though they had baby skin and truly neotenous facial proportions.

Peter F

"The female torso region becomes redder during menstruation. So if men respond to this monthly blushing, it would presumably be in a negative manner."

Ah i got mixed up there. So taking cosmetics as reverse evidence again then if there's any pattern (which there might not be) it should be of women (or at least prostitutes) lightening their chests not reddening them.

.

"Until the 1920s, the traditional female norm in Europe was "milk-white" and "peaches and cream". I could dig up references to prove the point, but it seems obvious to me."

For example

http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/gnxp/files/2013/08/255px-Lucas_Cranach_the_Elder-Adam_and_Eve_1533.jpg

Sean
"Anon, you're conflating modern lifestyles, cosmetics and tanning, with stone age sexual selection."

The opposite. I'm saying tanning and cosmetics obviously can't be part of the stone age selection process. However cosmetics could possibly be a clue given that if you do a quick google for the make-up worn by prostitutes from ancient times there is a consistent pattern of
– whitening the skin
– reddening the lips and cheeks
– darkening the eyes

That doesn't prove anything in itself but it does make me wonder if they were mimicing and exagerating a pre-existing sexual signal from stone age times.

.

"White skin also functions to elicit care so there is no reason to think European skin is any kind of adaptation for revealing ovulation."

Maybe so or maybe both but i'm running with the ovulation idea for now just to see what comes up.

The ovulation idea makes the most sense if females being lighter than males is universal. If so then in a context of strong sexual selection on the female side then you might expect lighter skin over time.

If you accept for the sake of argument that one of the most plausible environments for strong sexual selection on the female side is a harsh hunting environment where the hunted food is both difficult to come by and *required* to feed a family and not just a preferred alternative to bowls of starchy goop then the Bushmen ought to be similar in many ways to stone age northern latitude hunters.

.

"It would not surprise me if there was a positive correlation between the mating success and skin colour of polygynous African men."

I think it will vary depending on the amount of female choice. In a promiscuous polygyny there may be a lot of female choice and therefore a lot of female-driven sexual selection on the men but in a very strict religious polygyny where the females have no choice about who they marry then there can't be any female-driven sexual selection.

I was thinking that there might be selection for dark skinned men in polygyny.

Anon, you're conflating modern lifestyles, cosmetics and tanning, with stone age sexual selection. Human females have concealed ovulation so they don't get ignored by their husband when they are not ovulating. Concealed ovulation is for eliciting care and non sexual services from men; adaptations for revealing ovulation would defeat the object. White skin also functions to elicit care so there is no reason to think European skin is any kind of adaptation for revealing ovulation. Men may be attuned to and subliminally attracted by subtle signs of ovulation, because it's advantageous for males and always has been.

Peter, I think the idea that the darker skin in the most polygynous areas of Africa has resulted from natural selection of hoe farming women and weaker selection for desirable female traits in polygyny is dubious. Bushmen are not so dark and they spend a lot of time in the sun. I believe the Bushman persistence hunt (prey is run down in the midday heat). The women forage outside too. Relaxation of selection isn't a compelling explanation for European pigmentary traits. It would not surprise me if there was a positive correlation between the mating success and skin colour of polygynous African men.

I find this discussion of skin color and tones/shades a bit interesting on some levels since I arrived in the USA.

I find the Canadian actress Melinda Shankar pretty but she's of Indian descent, plus she's brown-skinned and not black-skinned.

Albinos are disliked because their skin is marred by cancerous and precancerous lesions. In cultures that protected albinos from the sun, like the Amerindians of the American Southwest, albino girls were admired as potential marriage partners.

Of course, Europeans find albinism in women unattractive (and I suspect it has always been so) and there is not really a cancer issue in those climates.

Men dislike heavy, rough-hewn facial features in women.

I wouldn't say West African women are rough hewn as such. You won't find a straight line or an angle in their face face and the facial shape is very rounded and softened, childlike. And yet European men find the facial shape generally unattractive nonetheless.

*If* there's an ovulation aspect to this…

1) then it's not so much the base skin colour that matters but the *contrast* between the base skin colour and the redder /darker areas when ovulating – in this aspect lighter skin is neccessary as a *canvas* for the ovulation signal not as a thing in itself.

2) Within each ethnic group the females only need to be lighter than the men of their ethnic group.

(Because it would have a direct reproductive effect a trait which caused men to be attracted to this contrast would increase among the population and that preference would come to be seen as beauty whereas men who were attracted to women with pale lips would have fewer kids and their preference would decline.)

3) If this process – lighter skin on females – is a universal bit of natural selection among all ethnic groups then wouldn't we expect a group that has undergone the most sexual selection on the female side to be the lightest?

That is the process itself may be universal natural selection but the *degree* to which the process was applied historically would be proportional to the pressure of female sexual selection on a population.

4) If you think of phrases like "peaches and cream" and look at the history of cosmetics it seems to me it's not about the whiteness of the skin on its own – at least in this aspect – it's about whiteness of the skin *contrasting* with the redness / darkness of the eyes/lips/cheeks.

Darker skinned women would need darker eyes and redder lips to get the same level of contrast as a lighter skinned woman.

5) I think tanning is part of a different arc. Light colours reflect more light so a light-coloured surface shows all the flaws on the surface – in this case the skin surface. Tanning masks those flaws the same way foundation does.

If the key element in the sexual attraction aspect of this is *contrast* rather than lightness itself then tanning can be compensated for simpler by using redder lipstick.

In other words tanning doesn't matter as much in the age of affordable cosmetics as it did in earlier times.

6) It would be interesting to see a study where they try and match lip, cheek and eye cosmetics with different base skin colours to get equal contrast levels.

Reading the post, Tembo is not talking about merely lighter, it is an undertone. "all women had lighter glowing ambience […]Some women had a definite characteristic glow to their lighter dark skin compared to the other women and the men."

Sub-Saharan Africans describe the idealised female as 'red', they can surely tell the difference between red and lighter brown. Looking over FWDM, many non white regions have an ideal of pink, rosy and golden tones. Not white skin in the sense of being as close as possible to actual literally white skin.

Given that lighter skin is a mental input for female sex recognition, and that Europeans' skin became as light as possible, during a period of sexual selection in an environment of obligate monogamy/male provisioning; it does not follow that extremely light (white) skin is sexually attractive. White skin could have been selected for eliciting provisioning and formation of a strong pair bond (love) in men, not lust. Sub-Saharan Africa isn't going to be enlightening on that point, because in evolutionary time they've totally lacked the male provisioning/obligate monogamy aspect.

In Europe, I would say men consider the ideal constitutive pigmentation for females to be a 'peaches and cream ' complexion. That is, very fair skin.

However, European women with the aforementioned ideal constitutive pigmentation often deliberately acquire a facultative modification to their natural skin tone, and it's not just a darkening. So I'm skeptical about the idea that girls trying to maximise their casual sex appeal by 'tanning' are simply trying to get darker; UV seems to bring out a glowing hue in the fair skinned. The kind of 'tan' that comes from exposure to UV lamps (which emit a different balance of UV A and B wavelengths) is definitely somewhat golden or orange, not just brown. I can't think of any other explanation for the glowing facultative look, other than it exaggerates and mimics some subcutaneous signs of ovulation.

"I'm not convinced that light skin functions as an ovulation signal."

Sure, i was arguing on the basis of *if* it did. My point was personal preferences that don't have any impact on reproduction can't be relevant and secondly that preferences which do have an impact on reproduction will come to be seen as aesthetic even if the initial reason is/was functional.

~~~

On the thing itself if for the sake of argument there was an unconscious attractive effect on men of some kind of facial or chest blood-related color differential then i think it follows that it ought to be reflected in cosmetics, especially as used by prostitutes.

http://stuffpoint.com/makeup/image/37249-makeup-geisha-makeup.jpg

Using cosmetic practices as reverse evidence i can't find any references to prostitutes deliberately reddening the cleavage area so i've ditched that idea but whitening the skin while at the same time reddening the lips and / or cheeks and darkening the eyes seems pretty ubiquitous.

So in reverse evidence terms those three areas ought to be the ones that glow redder / darker during ovulation – especially lips maybe?

It's a pinkish-golden tone to the skin. Sometimes it is almost orange hued.

I think I know what you mean. This is the kind of white skin that you see with Germanic and Scandinavian blondes, that tans well into golden or orangeish colors. It's different from the Celtic type of white skin you see a lot in the British Isles, that's like a bone white and that doesn't tan at all but burns or gets freckled.

I think people may be missing the point here. Sexual selection is about reproduction and only about reproduction. It physically can't have any effect if it doesn't lead to a reproductive bonus or malus.

In particular for the entire time this was evolving (or not) the difference between a Somali woman and an Irish woman is completely irrelevant. Only the difference *between* Somali women or *between* Irish women was relevant.

Basically

*If* women of all ethnic groups are lighter than the men of the same ethnic group

and

*if* that lighter skin creates an ovulation signal

and

*if* men notice that signal, consciously or otherwise

and

*if* that creates a sexual reaction, consciously or otherwise

then the husbands of the lighter-skinned women will on average be having sex more often around the time of their wife's ovulating.

So you'll get sexual selection for lighter skinned women (around their ethnic average).

Practically speaking if a couple are looking to conceive the woman should stay out of the sun and then when she's ovulating wear maximum cleavage tops with some added boob rouge for the full instinctive modified baboon-ass effect.

I don't know what Beyoncé's skin tone is like in the flesh. Quite often the lighting and filters of professional photography can give African American celebs' skin a kind of glowing effect that isn't really there. I was getting carried away about their skin being similar to tanned white women trying to look sexy.

In white women, the look I'm talking about is one I have seen in the flesh. It is not really darker at all so maybe it's not due to melanin. It's a pinkish-golden tone to the skin. Sometimes it is almost orange hued. Perhaps it's due to UV exposure causing increased carotenoids and blood flow under the skin. I suspect it may be mimicking an exaggerated sign of ovulation.

Skin color tends to correlate in a general sense with finess of features. Somali women tend to be huge outliers in África as a whole. East African women btw have Aráb admixture. I've noticed that Asian men and European men sometimes like their looks.

I think that the fineness of facial features is more important than skin color for the perceived attractiveness of women. Men all over the world prefer fine, delicate, elegant features. I don't think that elegance is all that subjective, by the way. Men dislike heavy, rough-hewn facial features in women.

Dark-skinned East Indian women can be quite attractive to men of all backgrounds. Same with Filipinas. Skin color is a factor, but a minor one compared the delicacy of features and of personality (i.e. femininity).

Test cases:

1) Albinos of sub-Saharan ancestry. The number of such albinos married to famous rappers and African dictators: zero as far as I know. They retain African features.

2) The complete opposite of 1): Somali women. They have very dark skin and Middle-Eastern type features. I suspect that if one were to ask men from a wide range of backgrounds to rate Somalis' attractiveness, the result would be substantially above the African average.

Some of the examples cited in Mr. Frost's post may be contaminated by the likely correlation between skin color and Caucasoid admixture in some African populations. We can think of the Arab trade down the East African coast, of the Portuguese presence since the early 15th century. If one were to design a study of attitudes to color per se, one would have to control for things like nose width, lip thickness and forehead height.

I had thought that the main natural selective driver for dark skin was folic acid, which is destroyed by UV exposure, rather than sun burn and skin cancer.

"Pure white skin such as north European women naturally have have, does not seem to be perceived as sexually attractive."

Hmmmm….

The Hollywood tan loses its luster

http://www.usatoday.com/story/life/people/2013/05/24/death-of-the-tan-emma-stone-jessica-chastain-taylor-swift/2148259/

Cotton Topped Tamarins: "Males and females look the same in appearance, as do the young."

Beyoncé and Rihanna go lighter, but they stop short of pure white skin. Both Beyoncé and Rihanna are at about the same skin tone as many European women arrive at when they tan their skin; presumably those women think that particular skin tone is the optimum for maximising their sexual attractiveness.

As I see it, in the modern West, sexually 'churning' women of all races converge on a look of tawny skin (and long blond hair) achieving it by artifice if necessary. Pure white skin such as north European women naturally have have, does not seem to be perceived as sexually attractive. I think Europeans' white skin has more to do with eliciting provisioning and inhibiting aggression than with sexual attraction.

The Golden and Cotton Topped Tamarins are very light coloured, monogamous and have males who carry the young about on their backs.

In Kurdish "sûr u spî" is considered as beautiful, which literally means "red and white".
I think it basically tells you something about the health status.

Tan skinned women that I find pretty:

– Alicia Keys (American singer)
– Thandie Newton (British actress)
– Paula Patton (American actress)

Bronze-brown skinned girls that I find pretty:

– Tatyana Ali (American actress)
– Liya Kebede (East African model)
– Kerry Washington (American actress)

North Africans are the palest and the most Caucasoid. East Africans are in-between and somewhat Caucasoid. West African, Central and South African are the darkest and the least Caucasoid.

I find East Africans to be beautiful. Their brown skin is gorgeous. But some Central African women are okay too.

Didn't Jason Malloy already provide evidence that "bare branches" don't lead to violence?

Tod, n/a of r/h/e notes says sub-Saharan Africans do not have higher testosterone.

Single men have a strong motive to leave rural high-polygyny societies for the cities (or for the West). But there are also many married women whose husbands gone to the city.
Ghana: Where'd all the men go?

On the other hand I've read there are an awful lot of households in rural Kenya headed by widows; high testosterone is not too good for ones health I think.

n the whole world's existence, at some pass‚, our inner foment goes out. It is then bust into enthusiasm beside an contend with with another magnanimous being. We should all be thankful for the duration of those people who rekindle the inner inspiration

curcumin is used in skin bleaching products and I think licorice is also—but dont hold me to the licorice (its been a while since I read that).

Curcumin apparently (when topically applied and not beholden to the acids of digestion) inhibits melanocytes. Our hair greys because of a increasing lack of catalese with age, which in turn keeps dermal levels of hydrogen peroxide in check. Its the increasing amounts of hydrogen peroxide that makes you hair grey and turn white by antagonizing melanocytes.

Ben10, Humphrey Bogart was short and brunet, not blond and blue-eyed. And I just googled Claude Barzotti and he really doesn't look much different from the average Frenchman. (Also he's from Belgium not Lorraine.)

Indians seem to be somewhat different in that the men seem to use lighteners significantly more often than in other populations. A hold over from the traditional caste system giving less prestige to the dark skinned 'lower orders' presumably.

We could say the same thing for men. Hollywood popularized the tall blue eyed anglo-saxon type as some sort of super hero, like Humphrey Borgard, James Dean, Gary Cooper and all the Hollywood legends. In celtic-latin countries (like france in my case) this might have make life more difficult for smaller browned eyed boys. Via cinema, local girls could be acustomed to attractive body types that were rare around them, and could have raised their standard by delaying the mating, i.e waiting for the prince charming.
In eastern France were nordic types are (actually, were) common, I remember that body size, eyes and hair color were part of the equation on the attractiveness market for girls AND boys. I am sure girls rate themself accordingly well before ten, and maybe later for teenage boys.

There is a crooner singer from italian descent whose parents came to Lorraine (north east France)before WWII. His name's Claude Barzotti. In his song he said that as a kid (like 6 or 7 old), he was perfectly aware of his differences with local kids who where almost all blonds while he had pitch black hairs and he wanted to be like them. He actually said "je revais d'etre un enfant blond". So we all suffer from standards we cannot meet. Girls have their strategy: they try to attract desired genes by fooling them with hair bleaching or other artifices.
Men have the opposite strategy, they take the genes they want: the rich & famous who date almost exclusively nordic type models: Seal, Tiger Woods, Yannick Noah etc.

Agree with Ben10, interesting stuff but the article could make it clearer that male preference for lighter skin long predates Western influence, and seems pretty much universal in all cultures. Which I know partly from reading this blog. 🙂

well Peter, you should have mentioned one of your own blog:

http://evoandproud.blogspot.com/2006/12/skin-color-preference-in-sub-saharan.html

Just to make a point that NO, Deracialisation like bleaching is Not the fault of the evil white people who imposed their standards of easthetic to the poor victims of the colonisation.