And the Oscar to the lightest nation on planet Earth goes to... Finland!

[Deneb]

I am not saying that Finnish people are "dark-skinned" either. They are as a whole fair-skinned. Anthropologists have also found the Finns to be fair-skinned, but in many cases lacking vascularity than even their Scandinavian neighbors. The Irish on the other hand, were found by the Harvard anthropologists to be extremely vascularity, only 0.7% lacked vascularity! The strongly pronounced vascularity was found nearly a quarter. The British are just as vascular as the Irish. A vascular skin is pink, ruddy, or florid in complexion. Very vascular skin have the inability to tan. Freckling was also found in 40% of the overall series. All proof of the Irish being fairest groups.

Sorry, dude. Wether you like it or not, Scandos are much lighter haired, have a highest proportion of light eyes and, scientifically proven, has a much higher incidence of Skin cancer.

Scandinavia 3, British Isles 0.

[Grace O'Malley]

Sorry, dude. Wether you like it or not, Scandos are much lighter haired, have a highest proportion of light eyes and, scientifically proven, has a much higher incidence of Skin cancer.

Scandinavia 3, British Isles 0.

So you're just going to ignore skin type studies? Em Okay then. No point in discussing further.

[Deneb]

So you're just going to ignore skin type studies? Em Okay then. No point in discussing further.

https://www.wcrf.org/dietandcancer/c...cer-statistics

Skin cancer rates: both sexes. Rate per 100,000.

Norway 29.6
Denmark 27.6
Sweden 24.7
Ireland 16.3
UK 15.0

[Grace O'Malley]

https://www.wcrf.org/dietandcancer/c...cer-statistics

Skin cancer rates: both sexes. Rate per 100,000.

Norway 29.6
Denmark 27.6
Sweden 24.7
Ireland 16.3
UK 15.0

Nothing to do with skin type though and more to do with sun exposure. If you look at any skin cancer study Scandinavians have much higher percentages of population in Skin Type II and III whereas Irish have most of their population in the Skin Type I and II category but it looks like you have changed the goal posts and want to ignore this and use skin cancer rates which are to do with exposing your skin to tanning beds and the sun. It just appears like you want to ignore this. Australians have very high skin cancer rates because they expose themselves to the sun and even people with darker skin types can get skin cancer. A lot of Irish get very bad sunburns which would have made them a bit more careful about sunning beds and exposure to sun.

As I said though you can ignore this but it smacks a bit of not being completely impartial. Finns have lighter hair and possibly lighter eyes but they don't have the same amount of Skin Type I and II that the Irish have and that is also backed up by science. So this is to be ignored it now seems and you are using skin cancer rates which is not the same thing. Another indicator is the MICR gene which causes red hair and obviously affects tanning ability and lightness of skin. This is also highest in Irish / British populations. All my family tested are carriers and we have fair and freckled skin which is a common trait for people from Ireland and Britain.

http://www.redheadconvention.com/irelandsdna/

[Saskatchewanderer]

Finns do seem the blondest to me on average, probably, although the difference between them and Scandinavians is just being nitpicky imo.

[rhiannon]

I remember reading that this is the main reason behind that very high prevalence of skin cancer in Australia. Most of the white population is of British stock (so closely related to the Irish) and solar radiation is very high there.

U.S is also very high in this infamous ranking with their abundance of people with Irish ancestry for instance.

This sun exposure comparison chart might explain why Skin Cancer is more prevalent in the United States:



Here's a sun exposure map for the world. The UK definitely sees less sunlight than Scandinavia.

[Supercomputer]

Finns only have lighter hair (precisely blonder surpassing even Norway's total, but less rufous) not lighter eyes. Finland was found to be 7% brown (pure dark) and 15% mixed by anthropologists. On the other hand, for the Irish who were studied thoroughly by Harvard University were found to be only 0.5% brown-eyed. The vast majority Irish by far have either blue or mixed eyed. By far most of the darker eyes are dark-mixed than plain brown, they were sectioned into the pronouncedly very dark-mixed (3.2%) and pronouncedly dark-mixed (7.2%), which gives a total of 10.4% dark-mixed, while the rest 89.6% are either pure light-eyed (50%) and light-mixed. This is the reason they wrote, I quote, "The distribution of eye color in Ireland is the most remarkable anthropological phenomenon that the islands presents."

You're misquoting. It's not "pronouncedly very dark-mixed", but "very pronouncedly dark" The figure pf 0.5% describes only eyes with zero greenish rings at the edge of the iris under close observation. This definition is probably the same as in Russian numbers in the Bunak scale where only 5% of Russian males have pure brown (1-4 Bunak Scale) eyes. Obviously Russians have more brown eye than Scandinavians (who hover around 5%), but the definition is almost certainly different and likely similar to that in the Ireland study. Scandinavians don't have 10x more brown eyes than the Irish.


I just checked the numbers again (The physical anthropology of Ireland, by Earnest A. Hooton)
https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?...view=1up;seq=1

Pure brown 0,5%
Green brown 3,4% (mixed)
Gray brown 5% (mixed)
Blue brown 43,9% (mixed)
Gray and gray-blue 4,4%
Blue 42,4%

Mixed eyes are a total of 52,3% giving us the following figures

Pure brown 0,5%
All Mixed eyes 52,3%
Gray and gray-blue 4,4%
Blue 42,4%

Out of “mixed” eyes

3,2% are very pronouncedly dark
7,2% are pronouncedly dark
12,4% are mixed equally
17,9% are pronouncedly light mixed
59,3% are very pronouncedly light

So a total of 77,2% (last two categories) of mixed eyes are light mixed or 40,37% of total giving a total of 87,7% light and mostly light mixed eyes.

59,3% of mixed eyes are "very pronouncedly light" giving a total of 77,8% light and very light mixed eyes.

So overall a total of 87,7% eyes are light and mostly light mixed (where the light part of the iris is greater than the dark part). However only 77,8% of eyes are light and "very pronouncedly light" mixed eyes (where the light part of the iris is much bigger than the dark part).

The latter I think is the functioning definition of light eyes because unless you look at eyes in very close proximity only a seizable brown or yellow admixture is enough make eyes appear dark. So for the sake of conversation 78% of Irish eyes are light and 22% dark. That is almost exactly the same number as Scotland in the John Gray study (Memoir on the Pigmentation Survey of Scotland) which makes sense since the Irish and Scots are very similar in Eye color (Scotland DNA project also found Scotland almost exactly the same percentage of Blue eyes in Scotland as in Ireland).

[Septentrion]

FALSE again.
Norway has twice the incidence of skin cancer than the UK and Ireland. Indeed, Norway has almost the same incidence rate as Australia, despite being a much colder and gloomy country. If the Scandinavians lived in Australia, their skin cancer incidence rate would be incomparably superior to that of the Australians

FALSE!! A recent study showed that UV exposure at the poles can reach an index level of 8 similar to that Australian lifeguards of the sunny Queensland state receive on a regular basis. Close to the Poles, the atmosphere is so much thinner especially the Ozone layer, so UV levels often exceed recommended rates for healthy living. This is the reason why Scandinavians tans so easily in comparison to British or Irish people, however if they expose themselves to UV light, they'd be good candidates for skin cancer and many of them are. While UV levels in the Isles are not as high and for the most part of the year is gloomy, thus their remote location was most likely responsible for further lightening of the skin. It is not a "prize" rather just good adaptation for that specific environment.

[Septentrion]

You're misquoting. It's not "pronouncedly very dark-mixed", but "very pronouncedly dark" The figure pf 0.5% describes only eyes with zero greenish rings at the edge of the iris under close observation. This definition is probably the same as in Russian numbers in the Bunak scale where only 5% of Russian males have pure brown (1-4 Bunak Scale) eyes. Obviously Russians have more brown eye than Scandinavians (who hover around 5%), but the definition is almost certainly different and likely similar to that in the Ireland study. Scandinavians don't have 10x more brown eyes than the Irish.


I just checked the numbers again (The physical anthropology of Ireland, by Earnest A. Hooton)
https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?...view=1up;seq=1

Pure brown 0,5%
Green brown 3,4% (mixed)
Gray brown 5% (mixed)
Blue brown 43,9% (mixed)
Gray and gray-blue 4,4%
Blue 42,4%

Mixed eyes are a total of 52,3% giving us the following figures

Pure brown 0,5%
All Mixed eyes 52,3%
Gray and gray-blue 4,4%
Blue 42,4%

Out of “mixed” eyes

3,2% are very pronouncedly dark
7,2% are pronouncedly dark
12,4% are mixed equally
17,9% are pronouncedly light mixed
59,3% are very pronouncedly light

So a total of 77,2% (last two categories) of mixed eyes are light mixed or 40,37% of total giving a total of 87,7% light and mostly light mixed eyes.

59,3% of mixed eyes are "very pronouncedly light" giving a total of 77,8% light and very light mixed eyes.

So overall a total of 87,7% eyes are light and mostly light mixed (where the light part of the iris is greater than the dark part). However only 77,8% of eyes are light and "very pronouncedly light" mixed eyes (where the light part of the iris is much bigger than the dark part).

The latter I think is the functioning definition of light eyes because unless you look at eyes in very close proximity only a seizable brown or yellow admixture is enough make eyes appear dark. So for the sake of conversation 78% of Irish eyes are light and 22% dark. That is almost exactly the same number as Scotland in the John Gray study (Memoir on the Pigmentation Survey of Scotland) which makes sense since the Irish and Scots are very similar in Eye color (Scotland DNA project also found Scotland almost exactly the same percentage of Blue eyes in Scotland as in Ireland).

I would recommend you to go and re-read the book. I suppose English is your first language, right? Only 0.5% of the Irish eyes are purely dark or brown. 3.2% are pronounced very dark-mixed and 7.2% are pronouncedly dark-mixed, the rest either mixed or purely blue! So the dark and dark-mixed category is only 10.9%. While in Finland, 7% were found to be brown, the dark-mixed were not separated from the mixed category. Who are you trying to fool?
As Coon says , "there is probably no nation of equal size in the world that is lighter-eyed, bluer-eyed than Ireland". This he said after revising the work and also comparing it with those from Scandinavian and Baltic lands.
The Ethnography of the Aran Isles shows that 89% of these Irish islanders have blue or light gray eyes, this is without counting green shades.
The ScottishDNA project puts the overall ratio for light eyes for Britain to be at 78%! Not Scotland! They also noted that both Scottish and Irish are more likely to be blue-eyed than the southern English and Welsh. In fact, Scotland is put to be roughly as blue-eyed as the Kingdom of Denmark, while Ireland's overall is higher than Scotland, so go figure!

[Rgvgjhvv]

They literally all look the same. Excellent