The popular hair texture of choice has ALWAYS been curly.
"Blue and green eyes will become so common that dark brown will become the rare and newly desired eye color."
I just keep typing and deleting things. Good lord the colorism and everything else.
I can't possibly claim anything but the whitest of privilege for my offspring, but Hawaii DOES fret that her hair isn't well-behaved.
(This kid is - I think - unusually raptured by physical beauty, specifically that of 18-22 year old sorority-type girls. Even though it comes with the territory for all five year olds. To the point where it's something I feel the need to address with her regularly.)
The popular hair texture of choice will be curly.
Of course!
You see a lot more curly-haired women investing money in getting straight hair than you do the reverse.
Point 10 sounds the most interesting: our present state of men wearing boring clothes really is a bit of a historical aberration. For a lot of the time before the mid 19th century Western male fashion was as exhibitionist and demanding as female, if not more so.
The serum that can give you longer and thicker hair in 24 hours! sounds ripe for hilarious abuse. You could surreptitiously spray it on people's feet in a crowded train, and then, the next day, it would be like you were commuting in a carriage full of hobbits.
The thing about "global warming will make food scarce so curves will be in" seems to be incompatible with "plastic surgery will be cheap and affordable so everyone will get it".
Maybe if you're Tyra Banks then it's perfectly rational to assume that, if food got expensive and plastic surgery got cheap, you'd just give up on food and get lots of plastic surgery.
I'm curious about the beverage that will give you contoured cheekbones. Something highly acidic, perhaps?
SUPPLY OF PLASTIC SURGERY MAKES ITS OWN DEMAND
Also people will all special-order highly unique and interesting features but everyone will also be converging towards a mean.
Come to think of it, those two sound compatible - everyone tries to pick out unique baby names and yet we all converge towards Emma, Madeleine, and Sophia.
Well, we'll all be converging on a sort of cappucino skin colour, but in terms of features there will be a lot of individual variation due to surgery. She doesn't mention the possibility that everyone will be able to choose their own or their children's skin colour as well as eyes and other features - or speculate about what they might go for - but since she reckons everyone's going to pick blue or green eyes...
Forget plastic surgery and beauty ingestibles, when do we get replicants?
Mary, Jane and Elizabeth are still there to be used; as are Merneith and Inana. People don't actually feel comfortable with non-trendy baby names, but they don't like to admit it either.
I have a toddler niece with one of those names.
One of the traditional English ones or the early bronze age ones?
20. OK. If it had been the one shared by the Sumerian mother goddess I'd have been impressed.
Forget plastic surgery and beauty ingestibles, when do we get replicants?
Replicants will be the end of the human race: market forces will make sure that their appearance is a sexual superstimulus, just as the enormous yellow gape of a cuckoo chick is a feeding superstimulus, and no actual human will seem remotely attractive by comparison.
3- One summer in high school, I babysat for a family that included a 5-year old. A month or so in, she announced that at first she hadn't liked me. I asked why. "Because you weren't pretty. Now I think you're pretty though so I like you now."
Except to liberal men. Remember Ogged asking why it was that liberal men claimed to be attracted to objectively unattractive actresses? Those men will father the future, funnylooking, race.
When I was about four, I wanted curly hair desperately. I insisted that my mother put my hair up in curlers or pin curls after baths to get curls for the following day. No idea why in retrospect, but I will be sort of sad when curly hair comes back into style. Luckily, I will also be too lazy to devote hours to styling my very, very straight hair into curls.
'The thing about "global warming will make food scarce so curves will be in" seems to be incompatible with "plastic surgery will be cheap and affordable so everyone will get it".'
Why are they incompatible? Cf all the starving Africans with cell phones.
Re: the evolution of the human race: I wonder if we've already managed to evolve increased rates of allergy to birth control pills and latex.
The kind of loose but tidy curls that almost no one comes by naturally already are in style.
I'm curious about the beverage that will give you contoured cheekbones. Something highly acidic, perhaps?
Nanocritters!
My mother wanted me to have curly hair as a child. I have unpleasant memories of trying to sleep with bobby-pins jammed into my scalp all over my head, and and at least one nasty ear-singeing curling iron incident. Now, it's settled down into being neither straight nor curly, so reliably unfashionable whatever happens. (Sally's is the same, and she curses me for it. Straight, it'd be fashionable. Curly, she'd have hair issues familiar to her friends. Voluminously wandering in a manner that doesn't actually curl as such is a problem that she feels alone in the world dealing with (given, of course, that I'm useless as a resource.))
Why are they incompatible? Cf all the starving Africans with cell phones.
There are many Africans with cell phones. There are many (rather fewer) Africans who are starving. There is not much overlap between these two categories, and of those within that overlap I would hazard that very few were in the latter category and then entered the former category.
Re: the evolution of the human race: I wonder if we've already managed to evolve increased rates of allergy to birth control pills and latex.
It has been pointed out that, thanks to BC technology, we are setting the stage for humans to evolve to want children as avidly as we currently want sex.
reliably unfashionable whatever happens
Unofficial unfogged motto?
Well, we'll all be converging on a sort of cappucino skin colour
That's not how it works!
28. The kind I associate with Macmillan and Wife? What goes around...
Skin won't be cappuccino colored, but it will be foamy.
35: yes, I know, but it's how Tyra Banks thinks it works.
Skin will be blue, green, red, yellow, purple. Many decades ago I read a book by I think Larry Niven in which women in the future died their hair colours like that, and it was supposed to be unthinkably alien to contemporary readers.
Have you walked down the street lately, Larry?
I mean, I'm sure it's a total coincidence that Tyra Banks has light brown skin and green-brown eyes and hangups about her natural hair texture and is apparently bossy about her curves. But that would all just be a neutral beauty standard and one that wouldn't matter anyway because once everyone's beautiful there will be no beauty privilege, except your robobutler will compliment you anyway to improve your self-esteem.
He's getting around better than I am.
I mean, I'm sure it's a total coincidence that Tyra Banks imagines a future that is an army of robot Tyras ruling over a world of Tyra-clones and their bejewelled man-slaves.
@42: How would a Tyra Banks replicant stack up against Rutger Hauer in giving the "attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion" speech from Blade Runner?
I do love the robobutler who will detect and correct your low self-esteem by complimenting your brows. We sure will be self-actualized in the future.
39: they dyed their hair and skin, I think, which isn't happening that much. I mean, not on my street anyway.
Your street doesn't have any self-tanning salons?
47: yeah, but they still just spraypaint you the normal boring brown and orange. There's no reason you couldn't get fake tan in any number of colours, but it hasn't happened yet.
Orange isn't exactly normal. Or wasn't.
45: John Boehner dyes himself orange.
Orange isn't exactly normal. Or wasn't.
The future's bright; the future's orange.
Because beauty will be so readily accessible and skin color and features will be similar, prejudices based on physical features will be nearly eradicated. Prejudice will be socioeconomically based.
Because our conceptions of beauty have nothing to do with that now.
Man, we should have gone with "Merneith". She'd be the only one in her class!
Perhaps liposuction will be seen on the same level as blood donations, when food is scarce you can send your excess fat to a poor third world child.
I totally want dying your skin unnatural colors to be fashionable. I'd do it myself, but I can't even be bothered to get a haircut regularly. Basically, if I ever decided to pay attention to my physical appearance, I'd be the biggest freak on the west side of Cleveland.
55: is she meeting like-named peers?
57: I'd go with a psychedelic neon paisley.
57: blue skin is not unheard of in certain circles.
60: I believe it's died out in others">http://io9.com/5964512/the-family-thats-had-blue-skin-since-the-1800s">others thanks to more marrying out and advances in hematology.
is she meeting like-named peers?
No. But I bet she'd meet, like, negative numbers of like-named peers if she were Merneith.
The future is here, it is just unevenly distributed. in waves of curly hair.
From the bonnier Banks:
Jaal Tonderon's face was round and wide and only just very beautiful. For two thousand years or so, rHuman faces had looked pretty much how the owners wanted them to look, displaying either satisfaction with or indifference to whatever womb-grown comeliness they had been born with, or the particular, amended look their owners had subsequently specified. The only ugly people were those making a statement.In an age when everyone could be beautiful, and/or look like famous historical figures... the truly interesting faces and bodies were those which sailed as close to the wind of being plain or even unattractive as possible, and yet just got away with it. People talked about faces that looked good in the flesh but not in images, or good in lifelike paintings but not on a screen, or faces that looked unattractive in repose but quite stunning when animated, or merely plain until the person smiled.
60: Also there are the Blue Fugates.
3: Hawaii's hair is cute, but from experience, she'll probably hate her hair for a while because it won't do whatever is in fashion. My mom I think dislikes my hair for being 'wild', but good lord I am so never straightening it.
64: I was thinking of just that quote. I think I'd settle for just being beautiful.
40 made a suprisingly good novel. Or maybe the butlerier one.
64: so Iain and Tyra Banks is my new favourite working partnership, closely edging out Friedrich and Salma Hayek and David Mitchell and David Mitchell.