Finns are apparently very skilled at identifying each other based on appearance, a skill I have yet to pick up. I've noticed that when I am boarding a FinnAir flight, the airline stewards are incredibly skilled at greeting the Finns in Finnish and the others in English. It's uncanny.
But in places like North America, these kinds of distinctions seem hard to make if not completely irrelevant...
So far, I've had perfect success with greeting people in Not Finnish.
I would have said she looked more Irish or Scots than English - dark hair with blue eyes is a bit diagnostic.
Tales of false identification: a Scottish friend of mine was walking down Oxford Street in London when a man walked up to her and without further ado started talking to her in Portuguese. As it happened she had lived in Portugal for some years and spoke it fluently, but why the guy supposed she would is a mystery she will never solve.
It's more the features of her face that I was going on.
It's odd - like Parodie says, it's all meaningless in the US. And I wouldn't have been surprised at all to find she was from California or something - but that's definitely not what sprung to mind.
She looks like a bit like my English in-laws.
Romanian women are, on average, viewed through rose coloured spectacles, it would seem.
Even better, South Africa is white women and black men.
10: Yeah, that's a lesson learned the hard way, I tell you what.
In the case of the Finns, the facial taciturnity might be another giveaway.
I can mostly identify Finnish people.* Somewhat relatedly, there's also a particular look which isn't found among all Scandinavians, but pretty much everyone who has the look is Scandinavian. It has to do with the shape of the eyes and particular features that are hard to describe. My sister looks extremely Norwegian in a way that is immediately recognizable to Norwegians but doesn't so much conform to the stereotype non-Scandinavians have of Norwegians. People in the US frequently think she's Polish or Jewish, and in Chile people thought she was Chilean.
*I once misidentified an Estonian girl as Finnish, though she was pretty impressed I could pinpoint her to that part of the world.
I'm not sure what to conclude from the fact that the woman who looked obviously British to Heebie looked pretty syndrome-y to me.
I had no idea the average Czech dude was a skinhead.
Also, is it just me or are the average women way hotter than the average men?
Isn't there some conventional wisdom that women look more attractive in proportion to their symmetry, but men look more attractive if they're distinctive somehow? I could be making that up.
The English are pretty much the same as the Japanese. Both fold paper, live on islands, and owned parts of China.
The averaged out people have less pronounced versions of what I think of as being distinctive features of each country. (I don't have distinct ideas in my head about all those countries, but for those that I do, I mean.)
Both have archaic monarchies and are known for dishes with fish.
Funny, she looks Belgian to me.
You know what they say. In the dark, everybody looks Belgian.
What you're looking for, Heebie, is the linear combination of faces that best represents each nationality.
20. But the Japanese are modally prettier.
I wonder if "looking Belgian" to a Nederlander maps onto "looking Scottish" to an English person: pretty average, but there's just something...
Maybe the non-negative linear combination, so you don't get any eigenface weirdness.
The only difference is building robots for having sex with vs just putting your penis in the Hoover.
The English will take efficiency over style is what I'm saying.
Both what eat eel?
(Health warning: in my misspent youth I once bought jellied eels off a barrow. It was the second biggest food related mistake of my life.)
30: If their auto industries are any indication, that's probably a wise choice by the English.
I have been mis-identified as Mexican, Chinese, Dutch, Swiss and Finnish (the last doesn't really count though: it was on the telephone, while repeatedly saying the only sentence in Finnish I knew). The only one that makes sense based on my looks is Mexican.
I think what's extra English-looking about her is the nature of her somewhat unfortunate expression. Any nation can produce some kind of slightly put-upon, accidentally a bit fatuous expression, but that particular version seems very English.
The vacuum cleaners look even more put upon.
Maybe thats what it is. She doesn't have cliched British features exactly.
Yeah, it's the pained expression and slight awkwardness of the photo that makes it look English. (Though I have to admit I had no idea where she was supposed to be from before.)
There's something about the eye sockets that reminds me of two Englishwomen in particular: actress Amanda Abbington and comedian Holly Walsh. Maybe something to do with different eye makeup norms?
[Proving accidentally the close assciation between Japanese and English]
I thought the face was absolutely Polish, or possible Czech. Perhaps the expression is uniquely English-pained.
I can normaly tell, on a plane to Scandiwegian parts, who are the NOrdics. A lot of that, though, is tailoring and styles of spectacle frame.
Nworb, sweetie, go and use your own computer.
Some Japanese friends swear they can tell the difference between Japanese, Korean, and Chinese facial types, but I've never been able to differentiate them. Though I can distinguish between Japanese and English men without the need to resort to a vacuum cleaner.
I can tell Japanese people from Chinese people because the former wear more expensive clothing as a rule.
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Heebie, did you say something recently about streaming from Jammie's server or something? I thought I'd pass along that an email I recently sent to so-and-so (at) unfogged.com has been "delayed", as follows:
Message will be retried for 2 more day(s)
Technical details of temporary failure:
The recipient server did not accept our requests to connect. Learn more at http://support.google.com/mail/bin/answer.py?answer=7720
[(10) mail.unfogged.com. [173.230.144.11]:25: socket error]
Just thought I'd mention it.
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AIHMHB, an Indonesian woman in Tokyo told me that Japanese like to insist that they can tell the difference among East Asians, but few really can, because she was always being mistaken for a local.
As for the woman in the picture, I wavered among a number of choices before finally guessing German. Is she a member of the royal family?
I feel like most of the Korean people I know either have really round faces or really angular faces, but nothing in between. That doesn't make much sense, does it? But I can't think of a counterexample.
Nworb, sweetie, go and use your own computer.
OH HO
If you feel like testing your ability to distinguish Chinese, Japanese, and Korean people.
I'm not creating a whole account just for that.
nosflow, I can't believe you just called Ume a ho. You'd better apologize, and perhaps offer a fruit basket while you're at it!
46: I just took their food quiz, and I kind of think it's bullshit: too many edge cases. Of course there's overlap in cuisine, but there's still a pretty big difference in "typical" cuisine among those countries.
46: Wow, I remember trying that quiz in what could have been no later than 2002 and doing very poorly. I remember others (I think Japanese exchange students) doing well on it when I pointed it out to them, but some complained that the clothes were mismatched to the nationalities.
I got 6 out of 18 (didn't register; bugmenot). That's bad, obviously, and I have no reason to think I "should" have done better, but it did seem like there was deliberate misdirection with the hair/clothing for a lot of them.
She doesn't look particularly English to me. I was thinking further east.
I was at schlocky store today and in the holiday display they had a "Hanu/kkah TreeTop/per" with customer testimony "A beautiful symbol for our blended family." The picture of the smiling family looking at their tree made if pretty clear which one was the dark long-nosed Jew and which was the blond haired goy. I'll add it to the photo pool.
54: Scottish people have been mostly well fed since the 60s at least.
I'm not sure what to conclude from the fact that the woman who looked obviously British to Heebie looked pretty syndrome-y to me.
That was my first thought. Then I thought "Bulgarian? Albanian? Some benighted land of misery?"
he woman who looked obviously British to Heebie looked pretty syndrome-y to me
It occurred to me too, but I suppressed it. Hm.
Soon, idp, you'll be senile, and telling your family that you've always had a thing for African-American bus drivers, so you might as well stop suppressing now, when you can enjoy the shocked reactions.
You know what they say. In the dark, everybody looks Belgian.
Belgian in the streets, West Frisian in the sheets.
I think I have now used that joke format twice and must move on to knock-knock jokes.
This thread reminds me that I should try to find a way to get a picture of myself looking thoughtful and employable so I can put it on Linkedin. I may need to be looking for work come spring.
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Go tell the Nazis: NMM to Alois Brunner.
Few things make the universe appear so cruel and mindless, if not outright malicious than that this evil bastard lived to such a ripe old age (a few missing fingers and eyeball notwithstanding). Burn in hell.
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This is going to be sort of a "Murders in the Rue Morgue" thing in reverse, isn't it? I was sure the ethnicity was going to be Scandinavian or perhaps Baltic.
Re: 55, there's probably a lot of blended families in this neck of the woods with a blond Jew and a dark Finn or German or something.
I was going with irish fo sho. someone in my echt-WASP family was pretty clearly fucking the gardener, since my grandfather and my mom and her brothers (could) get astoundingly tan, though g-dad and my mom had/have hazel eyes (her bros have brown). my brother and I inherited our father's dark-brown eyes and in my brother's case my dad's peculiar feature of being truly tow-headed as a boy--white blond--but then black-haired as a teen and adult, and having a fierce roman nose, with high cheekbones, and a heavy beard. the result is that when my brother travels around the mediterranean, everyone thinks he is a native wherever he goes, be it barcelona, athens or cairo.
my daughters inherited my olive-undertoned skin and dark eyes also, and people often think their father is asian (here in narnia.) I'm not really sure why other than that. they have almond-ish shaped eyes? not really. my younger has giant manga eyes with extra highlights. I mean, when they speak mandarin I understand the taxi uncles' thinking, but otherwise it's a little weird. my daughters will be excited to do the quiz when they get home from school, they pride themselves on this and we often play "spot the asian ethnicity of origin" when bored in airports. they were astounded when I told them zhang ziyi had been cast as a japanese woman in "memoirs of a geisha." girl y: "she's literally the most han chinese looking woman in the world! I think if she lived a long time ago she might have been the emperor's favorite concubine! but the emperor of china. definitely."
alameida,
From what I gather on the mainland most dark-haired dark-eyed Chinese-speaking foreigners are assumed to be mixed or even ethnic minorities from Western China (I have a friend who has been working on perfecting his Xinjiang accent in Mandarin so he can play into people's expectations). This is changing as people get more exposure to Westerners, but there can be a stereotype that "Westerner" = blond, so people have a hard time knowing how to conceptualize dark haired foreigners, plus it's common to assume that Chinese is too hard for non-Chinese to learn to speak competently. I've even had people ask me if I were mixed solely on the basis of language competence, even though I don't look Chinese in any way at all. When my Italian boyfriend came to visit, not a small number of people thought he was Korean, because he has pale olive skin and dark hair/eyes. I found this kind of funny because he absolutely looks Italian, but the locals couldn't get past what they considered "yellow" skin and dark hair/eyes as markers of Asianness.
Where I live, old people think I'm "Soviet," working-class people think I'm French or sometimes Russian, and well educated people tend to think I'm Finnish or Swedish (in that order). I'm surprised at how common it is for "Finnish" to be the go-to ethnicity, because it seems pretty obscure.
Also, on the mainland Zhang Ziyi is seen as slightly above average at best, and kind of homely at worst. Most people are totally incredulous she's an international movie star. In a memorable quote from a friend, "it's not that she's not pretty, it's just that walking one block on the street I pass about 5 girls prettier than her."
64.1 is like my family: my brother and my father are several notches darker than the rest of us, and my brother has been taken for a native everywhere from Catalonia to the North-West Frontier Province. (The latter with beard, which helped.)
I dunno, I think she's pretty hot, honestly, and I've seen plenty of chinese girls. but there are so many you know.
re: 4.1
Yes, I'd have absolutely guessed Irish. I wouldn't have said Scottish, although I know the facial 'type' isn't that uncommon there, either.
66: yeah, I'm pretty sure my brother could have a bright future in the death to infidels business were he not currently looking meaningfully at farrow and ball paint swatches and finishing up his home in west virginia. I used to have a great photo of him somewhere with one of those felt afghan hats and an sks (and a beard, naturally.) it was from the dawn of the digital era and may have become lost. I can't conceive of how a woman with my hoarding instincts can have lost anything, ever, but somehow...
My family splits neatly along gender lines. My sister and my mum have quite dark skin, tan heavily, and have dark brown hair and dark brown eyes. My Dad and I have blue eyes and lighter brown hair but were blonde as kids, and our hair goes blonde/red in the sun, and we have reddish beards.
My Mum, I think could easily pass for southern European [or Jewish*] but my sister has enough of my Dad's facial features that she looks [to me anyway] noticeably Scottish.
* the first time I saw a photo of Anne Frank, I thought it was a photo of my Mum, as she has childhood photos where she looks _identical_.
I used to have a great photo of him somewhere with one of those felt afghan hats and an sks (and a beard, naturally.
I have one of my brother, identically clad, armed and bearded.
65: It's almost as if "beauty" is a subjective judgement of the viewer, and not an objective quality of the viewed.
Yes, I'd have absolutely guessed Irish. I wouldn't have said Scottish, although I know the facial 'type' isn't that uncommon there, either.
Put me down for Irish too, if pressed, though I wouldn't have said she looks Irish to the exclusion of other European nationalities. Just that Ireland was the strongest candidate.
If I was your Mom, I'd say you and your dad were a pair of absolute fucking pricks to be honest.
So you guessed the person in the photo was from the UK? Well aren't you the fucking genius of the day. Must have taken you hours to work that one out? And you were so proud you decided to post it on this crappy fucking blog.
How's about you post a picture of yourself so you can get a load knob ends to comment on it?
I can only conclude that being from the UK is so embarrassing that having this fact publicly discussed is intolerable.
You know, you always struck me as too well-spoken to be British.
Jon Bowditch ("Kevin Carter") has set the bar pretty low for the rest of us.
75: word! new moby stays at bars way later than old mobes, too.
77: if I'd only known I would have made you feel worse about the tragic history of congo when I met you. you should have at least given me the opportunity.
I suppose I should have mistakenly tried to made you feel bad about Myanmar or something. then again, you were very polite about the whole chattel slavery stuff, so, maybe it was a 'least said soonest mended' sort of thing. hey, aren't you supposed to come to narnia twice a year or something, anyway? my business is ending at the end of the year, so I will have the money time to take you out for lunch. it's possible I will also have some money. I mean, obviously some, but I mean possibly from the business. cross fingers.
I'm peacefully sitting in the departure lounge at the Omaha airport, as one does, not insulting anybody.
ajay (fuck face prick) - no bar is low enough for you.
74 - no, the convention here is to post a photo of your knob end for us to comment on.
Where do we think "Kevin"'s from? Why did he say UK instead of England? He sounds like a southerner though, not sure if London, or the home counties.
Fuck face prick? Was going to say he's got your measure, ajay, but then I got distracted: surely fuckface is one word?
From Omaha, all parts of the UK seem the same.
The name's a dead South African photojournalist. But it's also a terribly common name, so who knows.
Oh I dunno Asilon, shall we all guess? Could be hours of fun, couldn't it? Shall we?
Or instead shall we comment on pictures like brainless motherfuckers all day, 'cos that is just as much fun isn't it? Shall we, Asilon?
How about you save yourself some time and go fuck yourself instead? Sound good?
moby! I didn't really think you were out late drinking! I was just luring our new commenter into a false sense of security. I know the bars in mobesville aren't even open this late. wait, you're traveling? I mean, not that you'd be closing bars in omaha, haha. when do bars close in omaha?
have a look at the gams on charming!
There's a reason we have two hands: one for commenting on pictures all day, one for fucking ourselves. It's how we know there is a benevolent God.
some of us are only looking at the pictures, walt. kevin is not a multi-tasker.
I'm traveling with a small child. I started at 5:00 am.
Alameida - Really? You are less than nothing.
It's pretty obvious who the new commentator is and where he's from. It's boring, though.
Walt - that really says more about you than I ever could. Enjoy your day special one.
Walt - that really says more about you than I ever could. Enjoy your day special one.
nattarGcM ttaM - very true, and everything is pretty obvious about you too.
Ttam- not to me. What am I missing?
Including, I hope, how boring I find trolls. Yes.
If anyone is a troll its Heebie-Geebie.
Misuse of the it's / its distinction. Clearly it's trying to troll nosflow.
My father's heritage is French, and my mother's family is mostly English with a bit of Scot in it. Maybe some Huguenot as well. In Italy once, by myself, wearing inexpensive Italian clothes, an English couple asking me to take their picture thought that I was Italian.
An American couple in France asked me and my roommate for directions. Then they told us that our English was very good, so I'm assuming they thought we were French.
I suppose that I look American, really.
O HAI al, next planned trip to Narnia isn't till June I am afraid, but lunch will definitely have to happen!
Who'd have thought a pedant would be as boring as ajay?
72
Um, no shit, Sherlock? The point is, Chinese (subjective!) beauty standards, Zhang Ziyi is not attractive, so the people here find it funny that she's a major film star in the West. They also think it's funny that, say, Lucy Liu is famous, because she is downright hideous by Chinese beauty standards. Conversely, plenty of women who are pretty average in the West are seen to be gorgeous in China.
Conversely, plenty of women who are pretty average in the West are seen to be gorgeous in China.
Got any examples we might have heard of? Chinese women, or Western women?
Also, Zhang Ziyi is a major film star in China too, isn't she? Wiki reckons she's one of the four most successful actresses in Chinese cinema. I suspect too that this
by Chinese (subjective!) beauty standards, Zhang Ziyi is not attractive
is a bit exaggerated because FHM Taiwan reckoned she was the second most beautiful woman in the world, and I can't imagine the beauty standards are that radically different between the mainland and Taiwan. Maybe they are though.
It's possible, theoretically, that there is some place where everybody thinks I'm hot. Maybe I should try China.
Either I've met a non-representative sample of Japanese women or that won't work for me.
ajay,
She is, as she's in Chinese films, but they're mostly films made for Western audiences (e.g. Zhang Yimou films). She's famous mostly as being a famous actress in films popular in the West and for being a trophy GF of wealthy Singaporean/HKers.*
If she's considered beautiful in Taiwan, then there must be meaningful differences in beauty standards, because she really is considered of average looks on the mainland.
For the reverse, I can't think of anyone famous, but most of the Western models in Chinese media and actors on Chinese TV would not be people who would not be able to pursue based on their looks in the West. This is also my personal experience, as I have physical traits which are pretty neutral in the West, but considered supermodel-level gorgeous in China.
*People don't talk about her much any more, but about 10 years ago she was the center of widespread gossip, when consensus was she was a low-class prostitute who slept her way to fame. I feel like much of that is standard misogyny though when people feel women get fame/fortune they don't "deserve."
Oh, I would say there are a decent number of Korean pop stars who we might think look kind of creepy or overdone or too consumptive who are considered very good looking in China. I can't think of any names off the top of my head.
Interesting, I wonder if your last para may explain why people are not very enthusiastic about her looks on the mainland. First para as well, come to that. If she's seen as a sort of Chinese Marlene Dietrich, I can't imagine you'd get many mainlanders admitting attraction.
I wonder if the Chinese reaction to celebrities and faces is anything like my mother's (and which I'll classify as "old country standards of beauty") which are entirely about the shape and symmetry of individual parts of the face, with no allowance for hotness, or allure, or distinctiveness.
112
If you have red hair and pale skin you could have potential in China. There is decent money to be made pretending to be a Western business man if you get hooked up to the right circles. Being a little paunchy should be fine.
A friendquaintance of mine in college had a crazy side career as a Japanese (super?)model. She was/is very plain/average by western standards but was plastered all over billboards selling makeup and perfume in Japan for a few years.
My hair isn't red. It gets a reddish tint if I have been in the sun much.
Does no one bring pastries to the blog anymore or has that tradition grown moribund?
My Puerto Rican grandmother had blonde hair and blue eyes which is where one of my brother's gets it from. The rest of my family is Italian (Sicilian, Neapolitan, and Milanese) and is all black hair and brown eyes.
122.1 OTOH if I'm reading the thread right maybe those pastries are long past their best "sell by" date.
117
Yeah, that could very well be the case. I've found that people are quite offended by her, actually, and I think there's a sense of injustice that her 'moral character' and physical beauty are totally at odds/disproportionate to her fame and fortune, and that sense of injustice in turn makes people think of her as uglier than they might otherwise think. There was a point around 2005 when one of the standard casual conversation openers was "how can you Americans find Zhang Ziyi attractive?"
118
That might be a good way to think about it. IME in China to be beautiful you have to have 1) pale skin, 2) large eyes, 3) a pointy chin, 4) a 'small' face, and 5) a 'narrow' nose. If you have those things, you are beautiful, and beautiful in linear proportion to how much you have them. (Like, there is no being too white, or having a chin that is "too" pointy). IMO, at the extreme it's kind of grotesque. When people talk about how beautiful a person is, they tick off the traits the person has and the degree to which they have the traits.
Misplaced apostrophe, sorry nosflow.
From what my girlfriend tells me, Chinese beauty standards seem to center around not looking Chinese. She had a mutually bewildering conversation once with an Iranian guy about how plastic surgery on noses in the two countries are generally aimed in opposite directions.
How hot is this person considered in China?
129
Hmm...hard to tell with the crazy outfits. Off the top of my head I would say she's a little dark and not skinny enough, and she also looks a bit too 'mature' in her face, but I would have to show the video to a friend to get her reaction.
It's possible, theoretically, that there is some place where everybody thinks I'm hot. Maybe I should try China.
I got a surprising number of looks in Taiwan that suggested I was seen as more attractive there than I am here. Didn't notice anything like that in the part of the trip that was in Japan, haven't been to China.
