Half Asian is the new white?
CVK
Apologies to everyone who has sent in tips about this article - I’ve known about it for awhile and kept meaning to write about it, but somehow it fell through the cracks. So sorry that this is a couple months behind schedule, but here we go. :)
The Jan/Feb issue of Psychology Today magazine included an article titled Mixed Race, Pretty Face? It was all about–you guessed it–hybrid vigor. But specifically, it was about the fact that Asian/white mixed people are supposedly the most beautiful of all. Oh and look, who’s the first person they mention in the article? Nice! this gives me an excuse to post another pic of Keanu Reeves on MMW! ;) Point Break-era Keanu, nonetheless.
Actor Keanu Reeves and supermodel Devon Aoki have more in common than fame, fortune and good looks—both are also part Asian. Known in popular culture by the Hawaiian term hapa (meaning “half”), people with mixed Asian and European origins have become synonymous with exotic glamour. In Hong Kong and Singapore, half-Asian models now crowd runways once dominated by leggy blondes. In the elite world of Asian fashion, half-Asian is the new white.
So the article goes on to quote several scientists who talk about how genetic diversity supposedly equates to beauty. And they also base a lot of the story on this really bogus-sounding study from Australia (we told you about it back in October) that claimed “Caucasians and Asians rated average Eurasian faces as more attractive than average faces of either race.”
Anyway, the whole thing sounds like a load of bull to me. I’m just amazed that articles like these keep coming out. Has some rich mixed person hired a really expensive publicist to keep feeding these stories to the media or something???
You need Other Magazine on 26 Apr 2006 at 1:14 pm
[…] They just won’t leave off, will they? Via Mixed Media Watch I got to this article from Psychology Today, annoyingly titled “Mixed Race, Pretty Face?” The article rehashes the experiment from last fall that “found” that hapas were (scientifically) more attractive than whites or Asians. However, this article gives a detail about the study that the articles I read last fall did not: The experiment by Gillian Rhodes, a psychologist at the University of Western Australia, found that when Caucasian and Japanese volunteers looked at photos of Caucasian, Japanese and Eurasian faces, both groups rated the Eurasian faces as most attractive. These visages were created by first digitally blending a series of faces from each race into “composites” to create average, middle-of-the-road features typical of each race. Past studies show that “average” features are consistently rated as more attractive than exaggerated features—such as an unusually wide forehead or a small chin. […]