Skin colour preference: why is there a preference to white

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skin colour preference is on my mind: why do people, most children actually, admit to preferring a lighter skin tone than a darker, most children (of all raises) will associate a dark skin tone with bad, ugly, and mean. so why? did anything influence this preference, or is it the colour itself that resembles dirt. i remember the white side of my family would joke about my skin colour ( I'm a Native Aboriginal of canada) saying I'm dirty and need a bath, or sometimes say that i was covered in chocolate all the time, even though i'm not very tanned. my white aunt and grandmother would scrub me very hard in the bath, joking that the brown will never come out.

so what is it? is it the general dislike for the colour brown? or is it that on television and in general areas in america, canada, and UK have white people, making it a more 'popular' and desirable colour?

there was a test done, called the doll test, displaying to children three dolls, one white, one tan and one black. most children (of all colours) say that the white doll is the prettiest, the tan is the baddest and the black is the ugliest.

my sister and i grew up with a general dislike for the amount of white kids to native kids and felt there should be more natives.

People are brainwashed as children by racist people. It's crazy.

I've heard about the Barbie doll experiment so I know what you're talking about. I have to admit that I associate light skin with beauty. I don't know why and it's even more confusing when I realize that I associate blackness with desirability. How does that work out?

I've seen a fair few orange people knocking about.

What I never understood is white people baking themselves in the sun to turn brown.

I'm sure, somewhere, there are peoples who prefer darker skin over light. You don't hear about that, though.

I hear a lot about Asians who undergo surgery to make themselves look more white, going so far to even try to surgically change their almond eyes to round European ones.

It probably also doesn't help that racism and prejudice is alive and well and still in control of some peoples' lives.

I think to a point people tend to stick to people of their own skin colour by nature, there are many exceptions to this and does not apply to all, read on. People pick up stereotypes quite young about people's races from the people around making it hard to break stereotypes, the media does not help this as well, example one viewing of the Fox show "Cops" to an impressionable audience would likely go along way to making someone perceive negativity of someone of dark skin colour. It would be interesting to hear from people in areas where white skinned people are the minority if the preference is flipped.

I was taught that everyone is equal and to judge people by their actions and that is what I believe.

Because we're more survivable in nuclear warfare.

I think darker skin is more attractive, though I attribute this to

a) being white and
b) being surrounded by mostly white people my entire life.

People with darker skin are to me, more exotic. Less boring. They even look healthier.

I wonder if its actually the skin colour people don't like, I rather think its more the facial structure rather than the colour of the skin, for instance people might say Black Women are not very pretty because they have big nose's and shorten that down to Black Women are not pretty whereas in fact White women with big noses are not as attractive as Black Women with a small feminine nose.

I think mixed race white/black are the most beautiful, like Halle Berry, or many girls you see in Brazil.

Centuries of Western culture, law, and beauty ideals that have placed lighter-skinned people on a higher pedestal than darker-skinned people can have that effect. It also does not help that dark colors just generally have negative connotations (white=pure, black=sin).

Interesting, I would have expected people to choose their own race.

Was this study done in just one area? If the study was purely American (or any other primarily white place), perhaps the outcome would be different if people of each race were asked in their respective native areas.

I think it would be fun to have a blue face or a nice colour that no one else has got.

Load of rubbish, give me a dusky maiden any day.

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