Beauty is skin deep?

Remember this one?

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President Cheetos is perhaps the most well known example of one being unhappy with their skin color.  Why this orange monster prefers that strange color is, well, his madness!

We humans are obsessed with skin color.  This president is not an exception, though his obsession is just off the charts!

We live in a crazy world in which the pale-skinned want to get tanned, the dark-skinned want to bleach themselves, ... Weren't we all dark-skinned naked humans not too long ago?

Our species, Homo sapiens, originated around 200,000 years ago and underwent tremendous diversification—culturally, technologically, linguistically, artistically—for 130,000 years before a few small populations left Africa to populate the rest of the world. These early ancestors of modern Eurasians dispersed into parts of the world that had more seasonal sunshine and much lower UV levels. It’s in these populations that we begin to see real changes in the genetic makeup of pigmentation. As people move into areas with much lower and more seasonal UV, they run into problems if they have too much natural sunscreen. Some UV is essential for making vitamin D in the skin.

The paler skin is an adaptation to life in the latitudes far away from the equator.  A darker-skinned person like me now has a much tougher time making vitamin D.

A few years ago, after the routine lab tests during the physicals, the doctor said I was deficient in vitamin D and he prescribed a dose of pills.  He wanted me to check in with him after three months.  I never did.  Because, as much as I believe in the importance of the hormone like vitamin D, I am equally convinced that too much of a good thing can be harmful--especially when it is an artificial intake via pills.  It is one thing to increase vitamin D intake through walking on sunny days, or through milk and yogurt consumption.  But, pills?

I grew up in a culture, in a country, where the skin complexion was categorized in so many ways, like:
Coal black
Dark
Dark brown
Brown
Light brown
Wheatish
Fair
Very fair
And, yes, even white!

A graduate school friend, who was from Nigeria, used to joke that there isn't any black skin--it is all only various shades of brown.  A white American grad school colleague noted that there is no white skin and once held a blank sheet of white paper against his skin to prove his point.

Madness!  It has taken me decades to re-wire my brain on this after all the brainwashing during my formative years!

So, if our skin coloring, with all the shades of brown that people in the old country are so attentive to, is a product of our evolution, then does it mean that the colors are still evolving?

Skin color is evolving insofar as we see all sorts of exciting new mixtures of people coming together and having children with new mixtures of skin color genes. If you go into any major city of the world, you see how children are being produced through such felicitous interactions. Not only the pigmentation genes but lots of other genes are getting mixed up. We don’t see much natural selection of pigmentation as we did earlier in our history because we mostly protect ourselves from the harshest parts of the environment—from excess sun or cold or dryness

We are mixing things up.  Soon, the world will be beige ;)

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