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Comment by thaumasiotes | Hacker News Reader

> and they persist to this day among the black populations.

Well, light skin preference for females persists to this day in African populations and every other population.

It was also present -- and documented even in Africa -- before any European presence existed, so it's strange to say that Europeans imported it. And darker skin is usually preferred for men.

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I'm not sure how to account for darker skin _may_ be less attractive to humans on a genetic level. It's a question science can't answer, so I don't know how we could control for it. i.e, it could be the truth that the lighter your skin is the more attractive you are. How do we rule that out?

>> darker skin is usually preferred for men.

Zooming out, you should understand than African's have darker skin generally because they literally selected for that preference and those men had more wives and more descendants for those choices, the reverse is true for Europe. These choices of course being influenced by other factors but the point is an example that it is always important to articulate the forest as well as the trees.

> It was also present -- and documented even in Africa

Do you have a source for that? I'm not disagreeing, only curious.

Peter Frost writes a lot about this. Here are two (heavily overlapping) articles:

https://evoandproud.blogspot.com/2006/12/skin-color-preferen...

https://evoandproud.blogspot.com/2013/08/perception-of-skin-...

Another observation he's made is that black children are born light and darken, with a noticeable sex difference:

- Black males darken until eventually they reach adult darkness.

- Black females darken until puberty, at which point they are darker than they will be as adults. One of the changes they experience during puberty is a lightening of their skin.

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