A lighter shade of brown This article bemoans the lack of colored faces in magazine publishing. Progress is being made-in the form of the likes of Halle Berry (the image that serves as the link to the article). It is noted repeatedly that the magazine reading public is diversifying. There are some red herrings thrown in about the % of the general population that is now non-white (not everyone reads Cosmopolitan at the same rates). Magazine publishing is also segregated to some extent, so one reason Cosmo doesn't have many black faces on its cover is that black beauty magazines fill that niche. Of cours, one reason it doesn't have so many black readers is that there aren't any black faces-so round and round it goes.... But what I find interesting is The New York Times definition of "non-white." In the United States Halle Berry is of course non-white:

To those of us who look closer though, it is clear that she is of mixed-racial heritage (her mother is white after all). Though she has African blood-qualifying her as African-American-her white features and lighter skin (and more importantly her exquisite physique) are close enough to European norms to satisfy and not threaten white Americans and serve as a sop to political correctness. Later on the article notes this:

And race itself has become more complicated and less definable, said Mr. Wynter. He suggests that many of the Latin superstars like Jennifer Lopez are often seen not as minorities by young white teenagers, but as a different kind of white person. Very few of the breakout artists featured on covers are dark skinned.

Here are some of the non-whites listed above that grace covers: Enrique Iglesias. Despite his Spanish (so in the US automatically assumed to be Latin American) surname-his father is from Spain (Madrid), while his mother is a Spanish Filipina (the pictures I've seen indicate mostly European blood). Christina Aguilera. Her mother is Irish-American, her father is Ecuadorian, and from the one photo I've seen, a light-skinned mestizo (it seems unlikely that someone of full Amerindian blood would immigrate to the United States). She is predominantly of European ancestry from the looks. The Times says:

The singers Shakira, Beyoncé Knowles, and Christina Aguilera, all nonwhite, have at times worn blond hair that is indiscernible from that of Britney Spears.

I have kept track of the careers of both Christina and Britney (as my friends know) despite a lack of interest in their music. The Times characterizes Christina as non-white and Britney as white, but the fact is that Ms. Spears' hair is as fake and her general complexion swarthier than Ms. Aguilera. Take a look see: Brown-eyed Britney always has more transparent roots than blue-eyed Christina. Of course, in the PC age, all people with Spanish surnames are non-white. As for Shakira and Ms. Knowles, the former is a mix of white Columbian and white Arab (Lebanese), while Ms. Knowles is from a reputable "high yellow" mixed family, at least judging by the appearance of her mother (she looked like a middle-aged southern California woman with a lot of fake 'n' bake tanning). Then the article moves away from women's magazines toward the growing "laddy" publications like Maxim:

But a newer generation of men's magazines seem to find ethnicity sexy. In the last year, 5 of the 12 women featured on the cover of Maxim, the spectacularly successful young men's magazine owned by Dennis Publishing USA, were other than white.

In the interest of thorough research, I decided to look up the cover of Maxim for 2002. Kelly Hu and Lucy Lui are Asian (Kelly is actually Eurasian-though she's from Hawaii so the combination is hard to parse). Not too surprising. Shakira is as I said marginally non-white, while Beyonce is high-yellow. I don't know who the other non-white person was supposed to be, though it might have been at the tail end of 2001. In any case, one thing you notice about the article is that it spends an inordinate amount of time on blacks, who are underrepresented from what I can see in "men's magazines"-and from what I read in women's magazines as well, some on Latinos who are generally phenotypically white (if Christina's mother was from Ecuador she wouldn't be considered non-white), while shafting Asians, when the women are pretty well represented in men's magazines. As Asia Carrera said: when guys want a change up from a big-boobed blonde, they go for an Asian. All this indicates to me that the journal of record writes stories on race to satisfy its own internal quota of guilt, and is more concerned with liberal politics at the paper rather than the real world. Perhaps because its based in New York, they can pretend that Christina Aguilera and Enrique Iglesias serve as the faces of Latino America, while ignoring Asians who concentrate on the Pacific Rim. I hope this post generates some traffic.... (though they might not stay long since there aren't any Britney Nipple Slips) Godless provides an existence proof: In response to Jon Jay Ray - there are Indian women that I'd wager are cross-culturally attractive. Aishwarya Rai is one example: Interestingly, she's of South Indian ancestry, though she is (I think) a Brahmin, and (anecdotally at least) would be lighter than the Non-Brahmins. Interesting note - Brahmins dominate Bollywood like Jews dominate Hollywood. Here's another Indian beauty, Miss Universe 1994 Sushmita Sen: Now, an interesting trend that I'll be following in the years & decades to come: When weight training and cardio hits Bollywood in the 21st century like it hit Hollywood in the early 90's, what sort of transformation will the figures of Indian actresses undergo? Empirically speaking, India is athletically atrocious - its Olympic performances are shamefully bad for a nation of almost a billion souls, and poverty is no excuse as not *everyone* in India is poor (and many poor Africans do quite well...). I happen to think that mesomorphicity is just less common in the subcontinent for some as-yet-poorly-understood evolutionary reason. [1] Thus I think that Indian models will (on average) have higher body fat percentages even after personal training/etc. than their European or African (or even Asian?) counterparts. This'll probably be more noticeable in the males than the females. Just a prediction. [1] Yet the climate of India is just as warm/tropical/fertile as that of Africa. It's stuff like this that makes me question Rushton's theories, though their explanatory power for East Asian, European, and Sub-Saharan African racial groups is clear. Perhaps the caste system can account for the difference, but I'm not entirely sure...there may also be multiple evolutionary "sweet spots" (or local optima, for the mathematically inclined) for a given climate. A wild card is the notion that the Indian & African climates may have some functional difference that causes differential selection pressure for mesomorphicity in one region vs. another, but this is a bit strange as well as neither "climate" is quite so monolithic. Long time readers, by now you know the refrain: we'll only know for sure when the hapmap comes out in < 5 years. Razib adds: Looks like Lara Dutta, Miss Universe 2000, has a pretty low body fat %:

She is 1/4 English (she is from Bangalore, but I think she is from the Hindi-speaking portion of the population, Dutta looks like a North Indian name).