Why are men often darker than women in couples?

[Peterski]

How about ''lighter black'' or ''brownish black''?

You need to buy Persil Black Gel if your black is "brownish".

[Peter Parker]

I don't think there is any blanket rule to this. Anyway blond men are a minority in most populations.

Anyway here's some couples with the blond man and brunette woman.

Don't forget one of the most famous couples in movie history:



Padme Amidala (Natalie Portman) and Anakin Skywalker (Hayden Christensen) from Star Wars. Also a brunette woman with a blond man.
I know they are not a real couple but I just wanted to mention them.

Ahh... I think both look cute like that.

[Alexandro]

I am darker than my girlfriend, not by a lot but like maybe a shade or two and she has light eyes. Idk, perhaps the old adage of opposites attracting or something like that.

[Luso]

Women naturally tend to be a little lighter than men, not all the time... but in many cases. Also men may appear darker if they have dark hair, on their heads, arms, legs... that’s my case at least. Not every women acts on this stereotype, although usually men being darker signals masculinity. But still there are many examples of a darker women with a lighter man anyway.

[RogueState]

I don't have sisters but often, among siblings, boys are darker than their sisters (not always, but most of the time)

Within the same family/ethnic group, men tend to be relatively darker than women

[Thomas Peck]

^ The above comments are untrue.


As you will see, in European populations, men are lighter skinned than women. They also have lighter hair and eye colors.


Also, the entire thread's premise is untrue. Most interracial relationships involve white men and darker women, such as latinas and Asians.


Women who have higher levels of the female sex hormone (estrogen) have darker, browner skin and darker eyes, and are rated more attractive and feminine than women with lower estrogen levels. So darker traits would seem to signal femininity among Europeans.


This may be due to the extreme sexual selectuon bias of Europe, involving repeated male-sex bias invasions of lighter, blonder populations in to darker ones.


https://journals.plos.org/plosone/ar...l.pone.0048294

Pigmentation of the skin, hair, and eyes varies both within and between human populations. Identifying the genes and alleles underlying this variation has been the goal of many candidate gene and several genome-wide association studies (GWAS). Most GWAS for pigmentary traits to date have been based on subjective phenotypes using categorical scales. But skin, hair, and eye pigmentation vary continuously. Here, we seek to characterize quantitative variation in these traits objectively and accurately and to determine their genetic basis. Objective and quantitative measures of skin, hair, and eye color were made using reflectance or digital spectroscopy in Europeans from Ireland, Poland, Italy, and Portugal. A GWAS was conducted for the three quantitative pigmentation phenotypes in 176 women across 313,763 SNP loci, and replication of the most significant associations was attempted in a sample of 294 European men and women from the same countries. We find that the pigmentation phenotypes are highly stratified along axes of European genetic differentiation. The country of sampling explains approximately 35% of the variation in skin pigmentation, 31% of the variation in hair pigmentation, and 40% of the variation in eye pigmentation. All three quantitative phenotypes are correlated with each other. In our two-stage association study, we reproduce the association of rs1667394 at the OCA2/HERC2 locus with eye color but we do not identify new genetic determinants of skin and hair pigmentation supporting the lack of major genes affecting skin and hair color variation within Europe and suggesting that not only careful phenotyping but also larger cohorts are required to understand the genetic architecture of these complex quantitative traits. Interestingly, we also see that in each of these four populations, men are more lightly pigmented in the unexposed skin of the inner arm than women, a fact that is underappreciated and may vary across the world.

----


https://www.newscientist.com/article...ness-of-women/

Feminine beauty, the subject of philosophical and artistic musings for millennia, can be predicted by something as basic as hormones – in women, but not men. Researchers at the University of St Andrews in Fife, UK, have found that women’s facial attractiveness is directly related to their oestrogen levels.

Miriam Law Smith and colleagues photographed 59 women, aged between 18 and 25, every week for six weeks. On each occasion, they provided a urine sample for hormone analysis and gave information on where they were in their menstrual cycle. None of the women wore make-up, nor were they taking the contraceptive pill.

There was a very strong and direct correlation between the level of each woman’s oestrogen and how attractive, healthy and feminine they were found to be, showing that fertility is related to attractiveness,” Law Smith told New Scientist. The faces considered most healthy and feminine were also deemed the most attractive.

“It is likely that those women with higher hormone levels also had increased levels of oestrogen during puberty – the time when the hormone has a crucial role in determining facial appearance,” she suggests.


The left-hand composite faces was from women with the highest oestrogen levels, and was judged more attractive than the composite face on the right, from women with the lowest levels of oestrogen.

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/23601698/

When comparing similar eye colour genetic profiles, females tend, as a whole, to have darker eyes than males (and, conversely, males lighter than females). These results are also corroborated by the revision and meta-analysis of data from previously published eye colour genetic studies in several Caucasian populations, which significantly support the fact that males are more likely to have blue eyes than females.

Ethnic preferences in dating, trends are for men to pursue nonwhite women and women to pursue white men:





Desirability hierarchy of males and females from four US cities. White men are the most desired while Asian and Latina women ranked higher than white women:





We even have ancient European DNA to confirm this was the trend for thousands of years. Probably most people in Europe are descended from lighter skinned, blonder male ancestor and a darker skinned, darker haired female ancestor.

[Peter Parker]

It could be an incorrect observation. Who knows.

However, when people talk about the features of their parents for example, I often hear "My father had dark hair and brown eyes, my mother had blonde hair and blue eyes" but almost never "My mother had dark hair and brown eyes, but my father had blonde hair and blue eyes."

So, I guess most "dark" people have probably inherited their dark features from their fathers, not their mothers?

[Roy]

Because men are on average darker than women, and don't forget that many women bleach their hair and in many countries also bleach their skin (South Korea for instance).

[Thomas Peck]

Because men are on average darker than women, and don't forget that many women bleach their hair and in many countries also bleach their skin (South Korea for instance).

Far more women tan their skin globally than bleach it. The Western skin tanning economy greatly exceeds the money spent on bleaching products, globally, and it's mostly driven by females tanning.


Men are only darker than women in equatorial countries, in Europe and the USA, other western countries, men are lighter skinned than women.

[Thomas Peck]

It could be an incorrect observation. Who knows.

However, when people talk about the features of their parents for example, I often hear "My father had dark hair and brown eyes, my mother had blonde hair and blue eyes" but almost never "My mother had dark hair and brown eyes, but my father had blonde hair and blue eyes."

So, I guess most "dark" people have probably inherited their dark features from their fathers, not their mothers?

Lol, this is a laughable attempt at coping. By definition, more people get their light hair and eye genes from their father, since men are intrinsically genetically more likely to have light eyes, and also light hair (excluding the fake blondes).


https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/23601698/

When comparing similar eye colour genetic profiles, females tend, as a whole, to have darker eyes than males (and, conversely, males lighter than females). These results are also corroborated by the revision and meta-analysis of data from previously published eye colour genetic studies in several Caucasian populations, which significantly support the fact that males are more likely to have blue eyes than females.

The lighter features seem to work better in men than women. White women lose out to Asian and Asian-looking mixed women in the West; a larger number of people with light hair and eyes will say they got their pigmentatuon from their father.