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Comment by smtddr | Hacker News Reader

I've always assumed this was because America/Europe's culture has influenced everyone else's. Pretty much everyone watches and is heavy influenced by american TV. We know what ideas and images American media portray(think standard blonde barbie doll image). Then speeches like this have to happen - https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=ZPCkfARH2eE ...and articles like this must be written - http://thehairpin.com/2014/09/white-beauty-myth

History of how black people tried bleaching our skin or straightening our hair. I still cringe that my wife wears weaves from time to time because I always remember the history of why black women do that; how it all started. I comfort myself by trying to think that they've taken & owned the weave in the same way black people have "taken" the N-word into their own identity... sorta....kinda...maybe...... it's complicated.

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This is not true. Even ancient Chinese had a strong preference for light skin tone. My understanding is that darker skin usually means a person is more exposed to sunlight, presumably from farming work, which is an indicator of lower social status.

That should be specific to a dark brown Chinese person; not to an African American. Since we know the average Chinese person does not have dark brown skin, seeing such a person would make you wonder why that is. e.g., we know dirt/mud is brown and generally shouldn't pick up a hand-full off the ground and eat it... but people still like the image of chocolate deserts. The color red represents danger is an almost universal way(assuming it's because seeing blood is usually a bad sign for all humans and animals)... but people don't look at a red rose that way.

>>This is not true

You can't really claim that America's history & media has nothing to do it. You can debate to what degree, but to dismiss it completely is impossible.

> That should be specific to a dark brown Chinese person; not to an African American.

If the preference were an idealized optimal algorithm, perhaps; but people are adaptation-executers. The simplest rule is 'lighter skin means richer', and so when one runs into an African, it's not necessarily perfect. (Although given how many poor African immigrants there are in China now, I'm not sure that's a bug rather than a feature.)

That's part of the problem, but it goes deeper, too:

Mainstream America not only tells whites "this is how to be beautiful." It doesn't even come up with a standard for blacks on how to be beautiful, implying that they can't be beautiful.

There are lots of ways to take this. For example, you might say, "well on the bright side, blacks didn't have to worry about needing to look beautiful, so that's freedom for them." That's a tough argument, and requires operating at a very enlightened level.

On the other hand, you can look at some of the bold black women of the 90s like Beyonce, etc. who asserted their own standards of what beauty is for black women. You could still critique that by saying, "well, America only lets black women have a standard of beauty when rich people in Hollywood can monetize it." And I believe that would be largely correct.

It's disgusting that anyone is monetized for their skin color, black/white/etc. And the real answer is to make people think for themselves and decide about whether to live someplace based on the facts or other criteria, not whether some investor could higher foreigners to show up in a commercial. The real answer here is to make people literate about the effects of advertising so we can't be fooled. It breaks my heart to see Chinese society getting made over in the image of some of America's crappiest tendencies.

"Beauty" has always been entirely socially constructed. There is no such thing as beauty, even when Beyonce "creates it". It is an invention of men as part of the larger social construcion of gender -- hence "what beauty is for black women" rather than black people in generally -- that is monetized more by make-up and fashion companies than by Hollywood. It's a myth.

The recent liberal development of the sentiments "everybody is beautiful", "everybody defines their own beauty" and the like is a naive attempt to mitigate a demonstrably deadly social poison by advocating that we spread it thin enough that it just becomes water. The actual solution is to identify that it is poison and abolish it.

> "Beauty" has always been entirely socially constructed. There is no such thing as beauty, even when Beyonce "creates it".

I think you might benefit from reading "Maxims or Myths of Beauty? A Meta-Analytic and Theoretical Review" http://www.jonathanstray.com/papers/Langlois.pdf , Langlois et al 2000.

The abstract seems to deliberately construct a misrepresentation and uses it as motivation for the paper: "Common maxims about beauty suggest that attractiveness is not important in life." The authors go on to imply that those maxims are meant to assert that something "is the case" when they are obviously asserting a "should be the case". Kind of silly, no? Unless there really are maxims that assert "looks are not important in life at the current moment in time, you will never be judged by your attractiveness today" -- but I've never heard any of these.

The three maxims that the paper names are all either of the "should" form or not at all related to "importance" -- the first claims relativity from person to person, not importance, the second asserts a "should", and the third is totally unrelated to actual social conditions (the "life" in "attractiveness is not important in life"). So the paper seems to exist for its own strawman, but I'll have to read the whole thing...

This phenomenon is not limited to Asia, Africa or South America. In Europe, especially in southern countries, girls with blonde hair and blue eyes are admired explicitly. In US/Canada as well, how many women color their hair blond/red?

My son is a black kid with blonde hair and blue eyes. I bet he'd make a fortune.

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