Light skin

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Accessed 19 Mar. Subscribe to America's largest dictionary and get thousands more definitions and advanced search—ad free! See Definitions and Examples ». Cite this Entry Citation Share. Log In. I've never thought there was a whole lot of value to being light skinned in a society that hasn't embraced its black people of whatever shade, but if people want to be colorist, you can't stop them.

Light skin

Light skin is a human skin color that has a low level of eumelanin pigmentation as an adaptation to environments of low UV radiation. Humans with light skin pigmentation have skin with low amounts of eumelanin , and possess fewer melanosomes than humans with dark skin pigmentation. Light skin provides better absorption qualities of ultraviolet radiation, which helps the body to synthesize higher amounts of vitamin D for bodily processes such as calcium development. As a consequence of folate depletion, they are at a higher risk of DNA damage , birth defects , and numerous types of cancers , especially skin cancer. The distribution of light-skinned populations is highly correlated with the low ultraviolet radiation levels of the regions inhabited by them. Historically, light-skinned populations almost exclusively lived far from the equator, in high latitude areas with low sunlight intensity. It is generally accepted that dark skin evolved as a protection against the effect of UV radiation ; eumelanin protects against both folate depletion and direct damage to DNA. Lighter skin tones evolved independently in ancestral populations of north-west and north-east Eurasia, with the two populations diverging around 40, years ago. Studies have suggested that the two genes most associated with lighter skin colour in modern Europeans originated in the Near East and the Caucasus about 22, to 28, years ago, [21] and were present in Anatolia by 9, years ago, where their carriers became associated with the Neolithic Revolution and the spread of Neolithic farming across Europe. A further wave of lighter-skinned populations across Europe and elsewhere is associated with the Yamnaya culture and the Indo-European migrations bearing Ancient North Eurasian ancestry and the KITLG allele for blond hair. These alleles can now be found in the San , Ethiopians , and Tanzanian populations with Afro-Asiatic ancestry. It is inferred that it may have arrived into the region via migration from the Levant, which is also supported by linguistic evidence.

General measures of health should be examined for several reasons, light skin. Similarly, skin tone light skin be more consequential for women than men because of its role in mate selection Dixon and Telles ; Drake and Cayton

Official websites use. Share sensitive information only on official, secure websites. Normal skin contains cells called melanocytes. These cells produce melanin , the substance that gives skin its color. Skin with too little melanin is called hypopigmented.

Are these skin tones the same? What is the difference between fair vs light skin tones? Sometimes, definitions change depending on whom you ask and where you are. With regard to many Caucasians and Asians, a fair skin tone is associated with white skin in general. However, when applied to non-Caucasians or mixed Caucasians, fair skin is just a number of shades lighter than a tan skin tone.

Light skin

Human skin color ranges from the darkest brown to the lightest hues. Differences in skin color among individuals is caused by variation in pigmentation , which is the result of genetics inherited from one's biological parents , exposure to the sun , disorders, or some combination thereof. Differences across populations evolved through natural selection or sexual selection , because of social norms and differences in environment, as well as regulations of the biochemical effects of ultraviolet radiation penetrating the skin. The actual skin color of different humans is affected by many substances, although the single most important substance is the pigment melanin. Melanin is produced within the skin in cells called melanocytes and it is the main determinant of the skin color of darker-skin humans. The skin color of people with light skin is determined mainly by the bluish-white connective tissue under the dermis and by the hemoglobin circulating in the veins of the dermis. The red color underlying the skin becomes more visible, especially in the face, when, as consequence of physical exercise or sexual arousal , or the stimulation of the nervous system anger , embarrassment , arterioles dilate.

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At times, the magnitude of skin tone inequalities among African Americans is similar to the magnitude of white-black disparities Goldsmith, Hamilton, and Darity A separate observation that the offspring of migrants with dark skin who migrate to cold climates have an increased risk of schizophrenia may also be due to low vitamin D during gestation and early life as dark skin requires greater sunlight exposure to make adequate levels of the vitamin D prehormone. Official websites use. Black women, for example, tend to have worse functional health, are at increased risk for several chronic illnesses, and experience higher risk of accelerated physiological aging compared to black men Brown and Hargrove ; Erving ; Geronimus et al. More recent research, however, has produced mixed results. Popular in Wordplay See All. However, dietary factors may allow vitamin D sufficiency even in dark skinned populations. The supposition that dark skin evolved in the absence of selective pressure was put forward by the probable mutation effect hypothesis. Retrieved on In each research site, participants were selected so that there would be approximately equal numbers of individuals across gender, age, race, and education subgroups. University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Increasingly lighter skinned populations are distributed across areas with incrementally lower levels of UV radiation. For people with very light skin, the skin gets most of its colour from the bluish-white connective tissue in the dermis and from the haemoglobin associated blood cells circulating in the capillaries of the dermis. These models examine the relationship between skin color and mean levels of health over young adulthood and middle life.

The first time New Zealand resident Harsharin Kaur visited India, the country of her ancestors, as an adult, she was struck by the amount of pressure there was for people to change the colour of their skin.

While prior work documents the continued existence of skin tone stratification among African Americans, one area that has been particularly understudied is the relationship between skin tone and physical health. That is, the experience, nature, and consequences of institutional racism and interpersonal discrimination differ among those of lighter- vs. The results showed a very high correlation between UV radiation and skin colour; the weaker the sunlight was in a geographic region, the lighter the indigenous people's skin tended to be. People with light type II skin can produce previtamin D3 in their skin at rates 5—10 times faster than dark-skinned type V people. The farther a place is from the equator, the less UVB is received, and the potential to produce of vitamin D is diminished. For the same body region, individuals, independently of skin colour, have the same amount of melanocytes however variation between different body parts is substantial , but organelles which contain pigments, called melanosomes, are smaller and less numerous in light-skinned humans. In the s, biochemist W. Retrieved 11 December For example, of two studies using data from the CARDIA study, one finds no significant association between skin color and self-rated physical health among African Americans Borrell et al. In Oakland, participants were randomly selected from a membership roster of a health-care plan. Avoid too much sun exposure.