Post by Bryce on Nov 1, 2005 12:48:06 GMT -5
You know what, Buddy, that's an interesting thing you're bringing up in this thread, I've already thought about that about my own example. A quick look at me leads to conclude that I look like a standard European, with brown hair and eyes and fair skin. One would certainly not think that I hail from Nordheim, no more than from the southernmost fringes of Europe. Since I've been applying for months the "skip-shaving-every-second-day" resolution, I look more Southern with a nascent beard (now graying) than when I'm clean-shaven. I'm one of these weirdly pigmented specimens who, like the outgoing chancellor Gerhard Schröder, have bushy dark-blond eyebrows whereas their head-hair is brown. Exposure to sunlight and seawater makes my eyebrows turn golden and my hair auburn, and gives my face's skin a reddish-brown tone, which makes me look like a Northern tourist. The haircut counts, too. An army-style hairdo (short or medium on the top and close-cropped on the crown), makes you look more Anglo-Saxon than if you keep thick tufts of hair on the sides of your head. Some call it the Prussian haircut, or even the Wehrmacht hairstyle. Anyway, my self-view is that I look more Southern than Northern and that it would be the opposite if I had light eyes, which would shift, on a hypothetical racial diagram, my appearance-frontier northwards.
In my opinion, blondism, even extreme, does not necessarily make one look like a Northern European. I've already met or seen onscreen blond people with very light eyes, hair, eyebrows and eyelashes but markedly Middle-Eastern features and I don't view them as Nordics but as depigmented Levantines. On the contrary, I consider dark-haired, dark-eyed and fair-skinned (when not tanned) people with well-chiseled jaws and chin, eyes not sloping on their external side, no heavy pigmentation of lids and under-eye area, absence of synophrys (concurrent eyebrows) and of over-lush eyelashes, no exophthalmy, no predominance of the middle third of the face when compared to the frontal cranium and the mandible, discrete nostrils, quite at home anywhere in Europe, even in Scandinavia.
To speak more generally, let's say we write down two columns of physical characteristics, Northern (or thought so) traits and Southern (same remark) ones, many Europeans trying to self-assess themselves could tick a few in each column, and the crossing of the Nordish/Medish frontier in a way or the other would depend in many cases on one or two attributes that make the scales tilt.
In my opinion, blondism, even extreme, does not necessarily make one look like a Northern European. I've already met or seen onscreen blond people with very light eyes, hair, eyebrows and eyelashes but markedly Middle-Eastern features and I don't view them as Nordics but as depigmented Levantines. On the contrary, I consider dark-haired, dark-eyed and fair-skinned (when not tanned) people with well-chiseled jaws and chin, eyes not sloping on their external side, no heavy pigmentation of lids and under-eye area, absence of synophrys (concurrent eyebrows) and of over-lush eyelashes, no exophthalmy, no predominance of the middle third of the face when compared to the frontal cranium and the mandible, discrete nostrils, quite at home anywhere in Europe, even in Scandinavia.
To speak more generally, let's say we write down two columns of physical characteristics, Northern (or thought so) traits and Southern (same remark) ones, many Europeans trying to self-assess themselves could tick a few in each column, and the crossing of the Nordish/Medish frontier in a way or the other would depend in many cases on one or two attributes that make the scales tilt.