there is a study on selection done on my harmony and sites like that which shows what people really want and not what they say they want!you might look it up.

This may shed some further insight on the blondes vs brunettes debate:

The average female porn star? A California-born brunette with a size 34B bra

A confounder is that the Lewis Study (2012) uses people from the UK as representatives of Europeans.

Yet, famously, people from the UK are rated as the least attractive Europeans, on several studies.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/relationships/6542263/British-people-among-worlds-ugliest-according-to-BeautifulPeople.com.html

Conversely, the East Asian sample is collected from "East Asia". Which presumably means, English-speaking parts of EA (so that the student could navigate the website), IE the wealthiest parts.

I believe that the Lewis 2012 study should be redone.

"OK if you compare either Whites or Asians to Blacks. But what about their differences?

I don't think you can take the result of this kind of study too far. The results are an average of the attractiveness rating based on a fairly cursory view which i'd guess would rate by facial symmetry, relative darkness and the presence or absence of typically masculine or feminine features. You would probably get the same result if you showed the same pictures but covered everything except the jaw.

"d) Are asian women really that hot in the eye of ye other beholding white guys?"

I don't think it's that. I think it's measuring how feminine the features are on average. Again you could probably get the same result just showing jaws.

///

Also bear in mind that white people couldn't come top because of PC and add in this is really about a broad distinction between tropical populations and everyone else because the hoe farming thing is tropical.

I expect the differences between the non-tropicals will be complex and possibly include some random elements.

As for bleach-blondness, it does look awful and slutty too, but as for girls’ idea of us liking it or not, it has to do with their confusion of our two basic kinds of “liking”… girls generally try to project an image of attractiveness, but also of (some necessary) accessibility, yet their left of the bell curve often fails to understand that too much of the second attracts no interest of the kind that could consider commitment, especially with individuals completely socializing within their half and thus lacking access to clues… there really are a lot of girls out there that fail to recognize that men are generally easy for uncommitted sex upon the slightest invitation, and genuinely perceive that the interest they see they can easily raise in their projected easiness really means they are soooo hot. I guess it is sad, especially when it confuses the norms in the wider society and/or exerts pressure on the population of the right side.

@ Peter, your wife's perfect, the leopard camouflage and the flat screen TV are the only thing i would remove…ahem pardon my french.

Seriously now, the lion story is about the missing context and the unknown environment, in which the face rating for attractiveness is made. There was an old paper about sexual selection among those pretty fishes, i think they were guppy fishes, in presence or in absence of a predator. The paper showed that in absence of a predator, the female guppy choose the brightest males, which in a couple of generation resulted in a very colorfull guppy population, while in presence of a predator the females choosed dull greyish males.

So the context matters during sexual selection. Now, instead of just a face, we can imagine a scene in which we put eurasian or african men, naked, in front of a lion, and let a multiracial sample of women decide of the most attractive males.
That is because 50-60 000 years old Africa is still, I believe, the environmental context used unconsiously 'by default' by women during sexual selection.
It is 'by default' because an isolated picture of a face provides no other clue about the environment, so the woman has to mentally build it and perhaps her atavic memory tells her to use the african environment as a safe bet. I very much doubt that postglacial europe or farming environments are the models used for these unconscious mental processes. Consciously, they may elaborate a mental story of how well a given face would perform as a farm boy, but this might strongly oppose their gut feelings.
In fact, including african male faces among a list of other faces could reinforce the inconscient perception that the unknown environment IS, indeed, Africa.
Can you discuss that?

That's why i suggested to remove or decrease the unconscious bias by putting the faces within an environment, rather than to let people imagine it.

"Whenever I go to a speed-dating event, a bar, or online, all the single men are dark "ethnics," while all the single women are Nordic blondes. I wish I could show you the pictures. The one or two 'ethnic' brunettes that I see are always married."

My completely unscientific explanation to your anecdotal evidence: Blonde hair only looks good on women in their early twenties and younger. Past that point, it starts to loose its golden luster and begins to resemble a dirty field of hay, and seem to make facial features appear more washed out.

Bleached blonde hair simply looks awful as it involves the elimination of all eumelanin, except for that in the roots as the hair regrows. It looks incredibly unnatural, and often clashes with the non-Nordic features of the women who bleach their hair. I'm not sure if men actually like that look, or if it's just one of those many things that women mistakenly think we like.

" All of them perceived a female face to be more attractive when possessing high eyebrows, widely spaced large eyes with dilated pupils, high cheekbones, small nose, narrow face with thin cheeks, large smile, full lower lip, small chin, and fuller hairstyle."

Which makes it a bit surprising that Asian female faces would be ranked the highest, considering that they frequently tend not to have large round eyes. That said, a lot of east Asian celebrities have undergone double-eyelid surgery, and I wonder how many of them were featured in the survey.

I always considered Eurasian women to be extremely attractive, and I realized that this must because a great number of them have round Caucasian eyes and high Asian cheekbones, the best of both worlds.

All this “hoe farming breeds populations to have relatively hotter males than females, while living far north has the opposite effects” idea seems to make sense at first, yet at a second look some questions pop-up quite easily:
a) OK if you compare either Whites or Asians to Blacks. But what about their differences? Why are Asians somewhat more feminine than Whites (they certainly are smaller and more fragile, and have less facial hair) generally speaking, yet not on every aspect one could lay on a masculine/feminine continuum (i.e., they are darker)?
b) Why are Amerindians darker and more robust than Asians Proper (if my impression is correct), yet completely lack facial hair?
c) Are hoe-farming Papuans darker or otherwise more masculine than the Australoids of Australia?
d) Are asian women really that hot in the eye of ye other beholding white guys? I mean, yep, I like a girl to be cute and shorter than me (myself being a bit below the average of my South European coethnics), but beyond a certain point, doesn’t flatness get in the way?

"I suspect that many nerdy white males prefer East Asian females because they see them as being more accessible."

I think people are underestimating the importance of height in this. Average or short white guys become tall or average relatively speaking. Apart from anything else this will effect their confidence.

"So far, the comments have been pretty negative about my wife's picture"

I like it.

You're correct that brunettes get taken off the dating market early, much earlier than blondes. I've noticed that myself.

But that indicates to me that they *are* very much sexualized, contrary to what you wrote. They are apparently in very high demand, otherwise they would remain available into their older years like blondes.

There's so many blonde women available that I myself have been approached by a few and I rejected them because they weren't my type.

Generally, dark-haired men are not interested in blondes. I know this not only from personal experience (I'm "ethnic") but also from talking to other men. They're all looking for brunettes who, for some reason, are nowhere to be found.

I do wish someone would look into this phenomenon because it's interesting and counterintuitive.

Ethnic brunettes (e.g. attractive dark-skinned women like dark Latinas, Indians and Africans) are typically off the dating market early because we're not as sexualized by the populace as a whole. We marry early, have babies and focus on non-sexual pursuits such as reading, creating things and whatnot. I can only speak as a brown skinned woman but being of a darker skin tone has made me less sexualized and I have more opportunity for friendship. I will probably get snatched up and go leave the dating market because I don't put such emphasis on being sexy and having recreative sexual relations.

Peter, you could use this blog, or another blog, to test your hypothesis, at least for males,because i suspect your readers are mostly males, and not representative of the general population.
You could put pictures of faces online so that people could rate particular features in the form of comments.

"There is evidence that the upper classes in many countries are lighter-skinned than average."

"Chinless" is an insult in the UK directed at the upper class. This also fits the idea of the upper class selecting a disproportionate number of the most feminine women over time and partially feminizing their offspring.

"Male raters gave the highest ratings to East Asian women"

If hormone balance in women is relevant to the skin tone they find attractive in the opposite sex, could the same also be true in men, eg digit ratio. I think the men may be untypical.

I live in the Northeastern US (NYC-DC). This area has a lot of dark "ethnics" of Italian, Jewish, Asian, Indian, and Eastern-European origin.

Whenever I go to a speed-dating event, a bar, or online, all the single men are dark "ethnics," while all the single women are Nordic blondes. I wish I could show you the pictures. The one or two 'ethnic' brunettes that I see are always married.

There's so many blonde women available that I myself have been approached by a few and I rejected them because they weren't my type.

Generally, dark-haired men are not interested in blondes. I know this not only from personal experience (I'm "ethnic") but also from talking to other men. They're all looking for brunettes who, for some reason, are nowhere to be found.

I do wish someone would look into this phenomenon because it's interesting and counterintuitive.

Reader said…
"Peter, I notice in your posts the tendency to describe pale/fair women as more desirable from the standpoint of the male gender, which is totally counter to what I observe every day."

This seems to run counter to most studies of online dating and counter to what I observe and experience. Perhaps you're in an unusual market. As such, it probably represents a strong dating market for the usual demand rather than the usual supply.

As Peter has noted, the rarity of blonde-haired women tends to produce a greater demand due to its rarity. Additionally, the paler-skinned female theory seems to be borne out in most cultures, as noted here many times. (The prevalence of tanning notwithstanding– though it is interesting to note that the tan look is relative to a Western female ideal rather than a facsimile of a non-Western look.)

I do find it interesting that in the somewhat phallocentric HBD world, there seems to be a lot of "testerical" hostility to any information that affirms a Western female sensibility as opposed to a Western male one. This blog is a welcome counterbalance in its study of Western females.

"In the world of online dating, a head full of blonde hair is worth more than a college degree – and with a $100 dye job vs a 100,000 tution bill, awful lot cheaper." – Freakonomics

http://www.onlinedatingmagazine.com/industry/research/onlinedatingresearch.html

http://www.statisticbrain.com/online-dating-statistics/

"Peter, I notice in your posts the tendency to describe pale/fair women as more desirable from the standpoint of the male gender, which is totally counter to what I observe every day."

You're observing reproductive decisions or casual decisions?

Many of the white men married to Asian women (Thia and Filipino I see are a couple of decades older. Hollywood uses what works, there does not seem any over representation of Asian women playing the female lead in film. There are virtually no Asian males playing the lead roles.

White actresses or models who are paparazzied outside while not wearing make up, are noticeably paler in those photos than you would expect from seeing them in their films or posed shots with professional lighting & make up. But, Asian models ect in 'real life' look noticeably darker than their posed shots with pro make up and lighting.

If all these studies are based on the visual clue from a single picture of a human face, seen frontally and isolated in a neutral bacground, then I have a couple of comments.

1) what about the 3d clue? If the faces are displayed frontally, the facial topology is missing. The minimum would be to show the human faces frontally and from a 3/4 perspective. For example, the frontal view of a face is good to show perfectly symetric features but is incapable to show a slight prognathism and other angular ratios in the bone structure.

2) (which derives from 1) What about imperfections and combinations of desireable and non desirable features? In real life, people are rarely perfect. What about a perfectly symetric face, seen frontally, which nonetheless reveal some imperfection in a 3/4 perspective view? I've read that asian women are extremely abhorent of prognathism, which might partially explain their consistent crush for european males, since prognathism is almost absent in european populations. But would the typical asian female still choose an european male with a perfectly orthognathic face if he had also an assymetric nose or other less than perfect features ?

3) what about the environnemental clues in the picture?
I undestand that a white woman would choose a black male face by default. The inclusion of the picture of a lion in the scene would probably reinforce this choice, because by default, human are naked animals in front of predators. But in real life, the white man is never naked. He might have a gun in the picture, and this in turn might twist his emotional reaction in response to a lion. So, what about the woman's choice now, if she has to choose between a powerfully muscular, but basically naked black male who displays fear in front of the lion and a white man armed with a rifle who only display concentration because he's busy aiming at a target?

I understand that one can only test one parameter at the time but once it's done, i thought it might be interesting to combine parameters to have more real human faces in real situation.

What about Indians (Indian ones, not American Indians). They tend to have darker skin than Europeans but don't have negroid face features. Can they be used in some way as a control group when assessing the impact of skin color versus facial features?

Laura Betzig:- 'In China they had it down to a science. Yangdi, the 6th-century Sui dynasty emperor, was credited by an official historian with 100,000 women in his palace at Yangzhou alone," she said.

"They even had sex handbooks describing how to work out when a woman was fertile. Then they would be taken to the emperor to be impregnated.

"It was all organised by the state so the emperor could impregnate as many women as possible. And they had rules, like all the women had to be under 30 and all had to be attractive and symmetrical. This was the system in China for more than 2,000 years."'

Regarding same-race rankings, from my experience, white women may like men a little darker but they don't like swarthy men. For instance, these white women like men with the "black Irish" look (straight black hair, pale skin and blue eyes). Perhaps the black hair signifies dominance but the pale skin and blue eyes show responsibility and adaptive docility to a post-hunter-gatherer lifestyle. Also, with such men, these white women would be able to have fair-skinned daughters. However, in my experience, white women don't really like "swarthy" looking men for long-term partners. They may say swarthy men are good looking in pictures or on TV but in real life would prefer to date men with at least some fairer traits.

Also, Peter, how do you account for class differences in men in terms of skin tone? The class gaps in European countries (among ethnic Europeans) might be narrower but until recently it was regularly noted that upper-class men were fairer than lower-class men, and I don't think it was just exposure to sun from working in fields. The entire "blue blood" phenomenon truly denoted an aristocratic paradigm, even among men, that the upper-classes were fairer skinned.

I wonder how much the values assigned at the top are a product of explicit processing resulting from decades of political correctness: esp. the high status given to black males and Asian females in popular culture.

For instance, would people in England in the 19th century have assigned the same values? (Nineteenth-century Brits had ample photographs of black males and Asian females but they didn't have a mass media to promote certain values — values which often conflict with what average people think.) Would Westerners throughout almost all of European history have assigned the same rankings?

I think that white women may at times be attracted to darker, non-white men but these same white women do not want to have chidden with darker, non-white men. For example, in my experience, blonde-haired, blue-eyed mothers want blonde-haired, blue-eyed daughters.

Inclusive fitness probably also figures into the decision. Frank Salter (On Genetic Interests, pg. 261) writes:

"For a person of English ethnicity, choosing an English spouse over a Dane gains less than one percent fitness. But choosing an English spouse over a Bantu, one yields a fitness gain of 92 percent….  The same applies in reverse order, so that a Bantu who chooses another Bantu instead of someone of English ethnicity has 92% more of his or her genes in offspring as a result.  It is almost the equivalent to having twice the number of children with an English spouse.  Thus assortative mating by ethnicity can have large fitness benefits, the largest derived from choosing mates within geographic races."

Here's a pretty frank account by an English woman who married a man from India and had a child:

""She's getting very dark, isn't she?" This is what one of my friends recently said about my much adored – 12-week-old daughter. She didn't mean to be rude. But it was a comment that struck me with the force of a jab to the stomach. Immediately, I was overwhelmed by a confusion of emotions. I felt protective, insulted, worried, ashamed, guilty, all at once. The reason? My lovely, wriggly, smiley baby is mixed race….. The truth is, whatever the label, the fact there is a label proves that my daughter's conflicting parentage matters….But when I turn to the mirror in my bedroom to admire us together, I am shocked. She seems so alien. With her long, dark eyelashes and shiny, dark brown hair, she doesn't look anything like me. I know that concentrating on how my daughter looks is shallow. She is a person in her own right, not an accessory to me. But still, I can't shake off the feeling of unease. I didn't realise how much her looking different would matter and, on a rational level, I know it shouldn't. But it does. Evolution demands that we have children to pass on our genes, hence the sense of pride and validation we get when we see our features reappearing in the next generation. With my daughter, I don't have that….But self-flagellation is not useful. I have more pressing concerns. I am now the mother of a 'black' child, even if she is more the hue of weak tea than espresso…. When she was born, pale but with lots of dark hair, I asked the midwife if her eyes would stay blue. 'Asian genes are very strong,' she said in what I took to be an ominous tone. No more Brady Bunch kids for me. The midwife has been proved right and every day my baby's eyes get a little darker."

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/femail/article-467787/I-love-mixed-race-baby–does-feel-alien.html

The standards of beauty are surprisingly objective, and are not at all "in the eye of the beholder." That is a feel-good myth promulgated by the PC brigade.

David Buss writes in his 2003 book "The Evolution Of Desire": "The constituents of beauty are neither arbitrary nor culture bound. When the psychologist Michael Cunningham asked people of different races to judge the attractiveness of photographs of women of various races, he found great consensus about who is and is not good looking. Consensus has been found among the Chinese, Indian, and English; between South Africans and Americans; and between black and white Americans" (p. 54).

Beauty mostly has to do with facial symmetry. Symmetry is a marker of genetic fitness, since developmental problems usually perturb it.

Peter, I notice in your posts the tendency to describe pale/fair women as more desirable from the standpoint of the male gender, which is totally counter to what I observe every day. My experience has been that light-skinned, blonde-haired women are readily available on the dating market and there is very little competition for them. The real competition is for slightly darker brunettes, who are in very short supply on the dating scene. I am not sure why that is, but this is something I've observed.

An observation – there are certain commonalities found in popular romantic fiction (such as Mills and Boon etc.). In this genre typically men are portrayed as wealthy, powerful, arrogant, professionally successful (‘good providers’)…and darker skinned than the female protagonists.
Women are shown to be more compassionate, caring, with less emphasis on professional success (though that is changing) than on nurturing and being ‘good mothers’…and lighter skinned than their male counterparts.
This type of (very popular) fiction is predominantly written by and aimed at Caucasian, middle class, western women.
I wonder if (in this philosophy) lighter skinned women are perceived to be more delicate/fragile/in need of being taken care off; and darker skinned men harken to the archetype of the hunter, out in the world providing and protecting? In other words, that this preference has no racial basis, but is an evolutionary and anthropological carry-over.

like itsthewooo2 said, this is completely opposite to the real world,a nd i think there is a misonception to what the study really says.
looks is about alot more than ski color.

pretty much all white women prefer caucasoid men and find african/negroid men ugly so when the study say that attractiveness increased with darker skin they certainly meant tanned skin like southern europeans which reflects real life.

when you look outside everywhere black men only get fat and ugly women of other races except when they have money/fame so they are definitely not considered attractive.

its true though that caucasoid men are considered attractive by both black/african and asian women.

All of the assertions everyone made on this particular concept seem to one dimensional to me. Why does everything have to be one dimensional?

And of course they are several studies who says that men prefer tanned women, because it looks healthier? So which study is true?

This study is bullshit, so only skin color makes someone attractive? Different races have different facial features. So every men prefer a fair skin Asian women over a tanned Latina or mixed women? Every women prefer a black men, a dark skin Indian men or a dark skin Asian men (Bali, Indonesia) over a white men or South European men?
One study says women prefer feminine men, another study says women prefer masculine men. One study says opposite attracts, another study says people are most attracted to others who look similiar. I also read a study who says that black women prefer light skin men! Studies are bullshit.

recently i have problem which is typical of many of us ! what i need to do and how to go on living, I did not understood ((I stopped smiling at ALL!!!! 🙁 yes!!,i have bad teeth because of heredity … why I? Teeth is the first thing you see when meet everybody,or doing something like that, I have found a solution in putting lumineers ! and i must say it has guaranteed 100% result,i will advice that its a good decision

"there is no reason to believe that prejudice avoidance is weaker in men than in women"

Women score higher in agreeableness than men, and I think most people's personal experiences confirm this.

Tod: "Many animals mate seasonally, for ice ace hunters with a seasonal period of hunger when would be the best time for conception ? I've read it would be would be the late summer for stone age humans"

Exactly, we should go back to stone age european physiology to understand how and why modern white skinned europeans were selected. That sexual selection filtered for neotenic caracters is very likely and I believe that too, like Peter, but it doesn't mean that white skin was not linked to other usefull caracters that we take for granted in darker skinned europens.
Paul Emile Victor reported that inuit women did not menstrue all year long. What about the brown skinned european hunters? do we know that?
Peter already said here that skeleton reccords indicate a higher number of women versus men, which fits nicely with his sexual selection theory, but what about menoposis and androposis in hunters gatherers?
I believe the average lifespan for gorillas-chimps is about 40 years, it's about the reproductive limit for women, but why the extra 40 years in lifespan in modern human and how old is the oldest iceage specimen found in europe?
Maybe juvenil selection was linked to lifespan and/or reproductive caracters and that synergy was very beneficial for survival. Selection for neoteny is not just about the look, if you look younger, you are younger and that probably increases the reproductive lifespan. Maybe the oldest and whitest male hunters were still able to father children when their darker skinned buddies could not and since women were in excess, that's just what they did.

Many animals mate seasonally, for ice ace hunters with a seasonal period of hunger when would be the best time for conception ? I've read it would be would be the late summer for stone age humans. Perhaps it is significant that there would be a tan by then.

And there is that connection between tanning (or at least a tanning drug) and sexual arousal.

I remember reading somewhere that in rural Normandy there was traditionally a very free and easy attitude to sex outside of marriage. Were the inhabitants of rural Normandy big on avoiding the sun before the twenties I wonder.

"In other words, there could be a trade-off here, and the point of equilibrium has shifted with the shift toward shorter-term and less monogamous sexual relationships."

Yes, this is what I call "tropicalization" of our societies. We are becoming culturally more and more african. Women choose not men with hard work, reliability, and faithfulness "K strategy" characteristics, but men who chat them up, dance well, have a lot muscle, etc. i.e. typically african mating characteristics. We just have to follow the evolution of dancing since the nineteenth century. Dance, which was a graceful, "monogamous" thing (like waltz) is now an individualistic mumbo jambo series of moves with sexual overtones in order to attract a one-night stand partner.

I've read a lot of ideas on this blog, on reflection some of them are reminiscent of what I've called "my" explaination above. It actually might be your explaination which I am rehashing in a convoluted way. If that is the case – sorry.

I didn't mean to suggest the sex difference in human skin color was evolved through sexual selection in the narrow sense of mate choice.

Given intense sexual selection of women lighter colored skin for women may be sexually selected for when the average is just a medium brown but I'm wondering if that process could go on until European full on 'white' skin was reached. Why did Japanese skin not go white in the way that Europeans did?

My proposed explaination is that once the lightening of skin by sexual selection gets to a certain point (let's say that point is more or less the skin tone of a Japanese woman), it halts. The reason is because sexual selection does not act on skin lighter than that certain point, so skin ( such as that of Europeans) that gets lighter than that certain cut off point for sexual selection must have lightened by some other mechanism i.e. selection of light skin for infantile mimickry.

In other words nothing actually changed in the 1920s because the white skin of Europeans was never any kind of turn on for men. that last bit of skin lightening to European skin was different to all the previous lightening because it was due to infantile mimickry.

The long standing preference for white skin was a cultural one tied up with concern with the chastity of maidens, eg chivalry and courtly love.

Japanese women are light but not white, maybe there is a point at which the ligher skin stops being sexually attactive and becomes 'caring and sharing' inducing; the Japanese never got that far but Europeans did. I have always been impressed with the way redheads with their extremely white skin are underepresented as sex symbols; lots of redheads bleach to blonde but natural blondes don't go red much.

If women evolved lighter, smoother skin and a more 'baby face' as a means to reduce male aggressiveness and induce feelings of care (in order to stabilize the pair bond

Hmmm, 'stabilize the pair bond' sounds like something that keeps a mate interested but in fact the light skin color is not really doing that in this context, if it is a superficial adaptation to stop women getting bashed about and starved by their brutish mates. By my way of thinking that's not sexual selection at all; more like infantile mimickry. Is it really permissable to call that sexual selection?

Whether it is or not I don't think it is a good idea to call it SS because it puts up a barrier to understanding and acceptance of the idea to call it sexual selection. Blonde hair is SS obviously and people – already understanding that at a subconscious level – get it immediately. White skin is different. It is certainly true that very feminine women have a vulnerable quality but does that really help them get a mate?

The idea of men actually selecting women for their white skin strikes a lot of people as slightly creepy. Maybe this is because it is contrary to the actual preference which is for a light brown skin in women.

I have a question.

It's worth noting that these studies have been conducted among White People, and I do agree that preference for lighter skin tone among women seems to be universal.

But what about the supposed preference for darker color among men? Is it universal or simply peculiar among white females?

Basing on experience, fair skin for men is valued here in Asia. Not as much as women, but still Asian men who have a lighter skin tone tend to be more valued as pop stars and actors than those with darker skin.

I also know a few women (and some of them are not gold diggers) who often joke about marrying a white person because their skin looks so good to them.

Assume a monogamous mating system with a gender imbalance which meant a man could pick and choose. Men who chose the most faithful mate would become more common over time whereas men who chose the most sexually appealing woman would be at a slightly higher risk of being cuckolded.

I'm just thinking out loud but it must be something like that IMO. Given the long standing and ever increasing extent to which a tanned appearance is percieved as making young women look sexually attractive. It's rather unlikely that a real sexual preference for light skin could be suppressed by a cultural movement to that extent and for so long. Light skin and dark skin can't both be sexually attractive.

It could be a size thing.

Race Bias Tracks Conception Risk Across the Menstrual Cycle – This uses similar methods to some of the studies you cite, but they don't seem to be taking the possibility that sexual dimorphism in skin color makes white men look less of a threat into account, what do you make of it?

We are going to see a lot more of this kind of spin on skin color perception research I suspect.

John the wanker said:

Anonymous then follows suit by attempting to question the reliability of this study because this involves "self reports". As if self evaluations should be measured according to length of glances, such as another (non-comparative) study.

What people actually do is more important that what people say, because their self-reports are influenced by social conditioning.

Researchers studying children use glance/stare duration to determine what children are interested in and the same should be done for adult subjects to remove the confounding effects of social conditioning.

This study is only interesting in that it reflects subjective values in the individuals surveyed, which may measure cultural attitudes associated with each subject's own identity of race, as well as trends or tendencies within those cultures.

As topics about race and color are often emotionally charged, I find the comments on a posting like this nearly as interesting as the posting.

ItsTheWooo2 seems to infer that the results of this survey somehow reflect the opposite-sex preferences of men and women of dark or light skin color, and then seems to be worried that this data will be misused to represent that light skinned women prefer dark skinned men, or perhaps more frankly, that white women prefer black men over white men. This study is not about preference. It presents individual evaluations incorporating numerous criteria (competence, dominance, maturity). Furthermore, ItsTheWooo2's refutation of the study by stating that if one were to only talk to white women to see for themselves that they don't prefer black men seems not a logical response to the article, but perhaps reveals underlying attitudes and insecurities behind the topics that the article represents (black and white race relations, possession, power). ItsTheWooo2's final statement stating the difference between shades of darkness when it comes to skin color only goes on to further represent attitudes and values that class and power is directly tied to "how dark" or "how black" an individual may be.

Anonymous then follows suit by attempting to question the reliability of this study because this involves "self reports". As if self evaluations should be measured according to length of glances, such as another (non-comparative) study.

Was the data obtained from self reports or from actually determining which faces they preferred by measuring gaze duration or something like that?

Self reports are notoriously unreliable, IMO.

I think you need to talk to women in real life, if you really believe women aesthetically prefer black men. Some do of course, but most women prefer caucasian men and this is true even among non-caucasian women.
There is a big difference between tanned darker skin and someone who is extremely dark.

This is the problem when an idea runs out of control and we lose relevance for real life common sense.

I have a question about the skin tone preference among men. In Asia, there are skin whitening products that are not just marketed at women but men as well.

Now, society probably has something to do with this. But it seems that dark skin preference for males is not all it's cracked up to be.