Go Sweden, go!

Ok, the lady on the right is Finnish President Tarja Halonen, reputed Conan O'Brian look-alike. Who is the lady on the left? The Swedish Secretary of Defense?

To be fair to Finland, Swedish Social Democrats aren’t always that hot either

http://expressen.se/content/1/c6...27/ afed58c6.jpg

(Crazy horse Anna Sjödin, head of Social Democrat youth organization)

Both look like transsexuals. Swedish trannies are hotter?

"To be fair to Finland, Swedish Social Democrats aren’t always that hot either"

But Swedish Social Democrats sure can hold their own in a bar brawl!

The Swede is some model (and except for the nose region, I'd agree that she definitely looks like a trannie). If you're going to compare just female politicians, Sweden is going to lose sooooo badly. You shouldn't miss eg. our dear Minister of Culture, now best known for her crusade against corrupting erotic pictures that CHILDREN might see on the Internet. Of course, this crusade doesn't concern her previous career...

http://www.sunpoint.net/~mavijo/.../ tanja_mark.jpg

http://www.sunpoint.net/~mavijo/ ...tanja_mark2.jpg

...since as long as long as the last piece of latex remains on, it's *art*, and she always had personal permission from Jesus anyway. (AWWGH. They made her the Minister of Culture!)

Is Victoria Silvstedt really Swedish? I believe she's living in New York, married to some American. Perhaps she's not fit to represent the Swedes. I think you ought isntead to compare two persons actually living in the countries in question. For a better Swedish example, I would therefore like to suggest Nalin Pekgul (chairman of the Swedish Social Democratic Womens' League):

http://svt.se/content/1/c6/34/59...59/ nalin380.jpg

If you're going to let Sweden compete with a model, you should have Finland do the same.

I suggest Finland be represented by Kata Kârkkâinen:

http://cr3.com/adult/playboy/cov...ers/ 1988_12.jpg

http://images.google.com/images?...nen& btnG=Search
(warning - if you have "safe search" off, you'll get a lot of NSFW pictures - she was a Playboy model)

Reale,

That name doesn't sound Swedish - the ending "gul" - more like from the area where some of the Iranian or Turkish languages are spoken ??

Pekgul's a Kurd.

Pekgul's a Kurd

Yep - though the name is Turkish ("Pekgul" literally means "pretty rosy"; how accurate, eh?).

I saw genuine Nordic material (in Norway) that looked quite like her, though.

Well, perhaps in a few hundred years' time, Kurds will be the new Finns - after they take over Sweden. Somebody help them get the mutation for the fold.

By the way guys, what do you think this girl is, ethnically?

neo, what do you think this is, the dodona message boards? :)

I still cant come up with an intelligent and sincere comment on this one....

If we want to be semi-serious:

Sweden probably will not do much better than Finland or other western countries in the super-model category.

But Swedish girls will crush any other nation, including top tiers Denmark and Norway, in the top 20-30% category. It is no exaggeration that the average worker in 7-11 looks better than the beauty queen at the average American high school.

The question is why. I really have no idea. One reason is that they take better care of themselves, the share of overweight women is one of the lowest in the western world. But there is more to it, looking at faces. Blonde-blue eyed is not enough either, plenty of Americans, Britts, Germans are like that, and still don’t look hot. The “cultural” idea is hardly convinsing, given the fact that Swedish men are not considered especially attractive (except Viking Lord Dobeln of course).

Maybe there is something to the cold-women dependent on men theory (but why are Siberians not equally good looking?).

For curiosity:

There are barely 30.000 Kurds in Sweden, 0.3% of the population. 40% of “immigrants” to Sweden are from other Nordic and northwest-European countries. The total share of non-European immigrants is (for all the hype) still below 4%. Add another 3% from eastern and southern Europe. Including second generation almost 90% of Swedes are still stereotypical northern whites. Don’t let experience from immigrant centered city centers such as Stockholm and Malmo fool you.

For a scientific test of how above average Swedish teens look like klick on www.snyggast.se, and on “tjejer” (girls). Go through the top 20 for any given day, than come back and tell me Finland does better. (the underage limit in Sweden is 15, so don’t worry)

I dunno which site is the most popular for exhibitionist Finns these days (if there are any), but here's some:

http://www.city.fi/peilikuva/stats/

http://www.frendille.net/hot/kuu...mib=199& esita=2

Maybe there is something to the cold-women dependent on men theory (but why are Siberians not equally good looking?).

Yeah - Siberians, Saami, and Finns (for the part of their gene pool that differs from Swedes) should all have spent more time in hunting economies in the last few millennia than Swedes.

Teller:

For a scientific test of how above average Swedish teens look like klick on www.snyggast.se, and on “tjejer” (girls). Go through the top 20 for any given day, than come back and tell me Finland does better.

Finland does clearly better. Swedish women are already, on average, somewhat more masculine looking and eg. Danes much more masculine.

There can be no argument about this, because my sample of girls is clearly sufficient (well, it is when talking about IRL spotting of *faces*). I, of course, cannot understand how anyone could disagree about it, as the simple, obvious fact is that the pole of femininity and female beauty is somewhere in the region Finland-northern European Russia. Sweden still has much more very cute girls than most European countries, but that's because Swedes have much more girls that look like Finns than most Europeans do. :-)

(Of course, in reality with something like snyggaste I would hardly realize that I'm browsing a Swedish site if it didn't actually say so. The way I *would* eventually realize it would be through seeing more girls with "Swedish-specific" traits (which do look less attractive to my eye) than I'd expect, of course. But to realize that you need to go through a lot of girls first.)

windy:

I dunno which site is the most popular for exhibitionist Finns these days (if there are any), but here's some:

The most popular picture site among young people is

http://irc-galleria.net/

but that's not so much an exhibitionist site (not the self-selection for prettiness) and it has lots of badly underage meat (it's only legal to drool when they're 16). They do boast having something like *a half* of Finns of some age groups as users, though, so it's a good sample of looks... (also somewhat representative of minority youth, so if someone wants to see how many non-northern-European immigrants there are in Finland, they can keep clicking "satunnainen")

Yeah - Siberians, Saami, and Finns (for the part of their gene pool that differs from Swedes) should all have spent more time in hunting economies in the last few millennia than Swedes.

If you want a gene pool certainly distinct from Swedes' and with a maximal length of hunting life, the best fit among Finnic peoples would be the Komis. (Of course, their gene pool is then influenced by the neighbours (Siberians, northernmost Russians, southernmore Finnic peoples). And finding a hotornot might be a bit difficult.)

It would be great if someone did science on this. Just get 500 pictures of random Swedes, finns, americans (for example from a high school year book) and ask people to rate them.

wut you need is dienekes pontiksen.

I nominate actress Minna Aaltonen as the Finnish repreentative.

wut you need is dienekes pontiksen.

What you need is some pontikka. Then they'll all look fine.

i noticed the tranny thing too btw. but she was a playboy model. *shrug*

Ok, guys I don't know if this is considered 100% relevant to this particular discussion (if not Razib, I apologize), but some of you might find it interesting...

The maps of "blondeness" & "blue eyes" in the discussion on Frost's paper didnt make intuitive sense for Sweden, at least not for the frequency of light eyes if it referred to "swedes"...

http://www.gnxp.com/blog/2006/03...r-blue- eyes.php

The other day, I found a 1927 review of Lundborg's The Racial Characters of the Swedish Nation. According to Lundborg

86,9% of Swedes have "light eye colour"

8,1% "melerade" ie mixed/marbled (without being an expert I suspect that a fair share of these might be classified as "light" internationally)

5,0% Brown

Brown eyes were most common in the north, followed by the very south & Stockholm, which makes sense (the north probably has sami influence, the south danish & german, stockholm german)...

Regarding hair color

6,9% "light blonde"

62,5% "blonde" (must include what many would call light brown I guess)

25,1% Brown

2% Brown/black

0,2% Blueish black

3,3% red

As far as I can see this data refers to 47000+ young males (a cohort?) from the compulsory military draft and should be pretty reliable...

http://runeberg.org/halsovan/192.../1927/ 0182.html

As for finland vs sweden, it might be of interest to note that for a long period of time 20% (or more) of the finnish population were classified as native swedish speakers (this doesnt necessarily imply ethnicity). In 1900 it was 12,8%, today 5,5%...

Finally, how would you classify ex-playboy model & violinist Linda Lampenius in this battle of nations?

Born in finland, surname suggests swedish speaking ("old" priestly or academic family background), spends a lot of time in Sweden...

http://www.inmag.fi/linda/english/

Brown eyes were most common in the north, followed by the very south & Stockholm, which makes sense (the north probably has sami influence, the south danish & german, stockholm german)...

Speaking about "Danish influence" sounds strange. Swedes and Danes did not start out as some entirely separate people; the population of southern Sweden did not come about as some mixing together of "Swedes" and "Danes", it has had population for a longer time than there have been "Swedes" or "Danes". "Swedish" and "Danish" are later political-cultural boundaries imposed somewhat arbitrarily (and fluctuatingly) on a population that already likely had this kind of clinal variations (which may have had different distributions, of course). (The language division between Swedish and Danish isn't really even greater than the variation *within* Finnish...)

As for finland vs sweden, it might be of interest to note that for a long period of time 20% (or more) of the finnish population were classified as native swedish speakers (this doesnt necessarily imply ethnicity). In 1900 it was 12,8%, today 5,5%...

You should note that before the 19th century the percentage would've had wild fluctuations depending on just where the border of "Finland" would've went, not because something actually changed about the population. But yes, there's been a sharp decline this century, mainly because of immigration to Sweden and assimilation (or de-assimilation of Finns). These days the vast majority of Swedish-speakers are actually bilingual and I think a very large proportion of them identify as "Swedish-speakers" only because of stuff like the language quotas giving Swedish-speakers easier access to universities and such... (Ie. Swedish-speakers often have lower score requirements on admission tests because that's what "minority rights" are today believed to be. Finland has had "affirmative action" for a rather long time...)

Also, there's a similar number of Finns in Sweden and similar pre-modern groups of Finnish migrants to Sweden (mostly to the central areas), even though they're not as tracked and well-known because the interaction has been "politically" imbalanced. (I hate it when people point out how many Swedes have moved to Finland without pointing out/realizing the flow to the other direction.)

As for Linda Lampenius, she is Swedish-speaking (read: bilingual), but nothing in her looks makes her look either strongly "Swedish" or "Finnish" to me. (I'm not strongly into her looks, though - she looks weird.) But she's usually buried under two feet of make up anyway, so I wouldn't even know.

Only 5 % of Swedes had brown eyes? That sounds low, unless most of the people having "marbled" eyes had mixed brown. I assume even 'lower races' such as Saami and Finns had to go to the army in 1927 Sweden?

Only 5 % of Swedes had brown eyes? That sounds low, unless most of the people having "marbled" eyes had mixed brown. I assume even 'lower races' such as Saami and Finns had to go to the army in 1927 Sweden?

If Finns weren't counted in that, would you expect that to make the percentage of brown eyes go up or down? From what I've seen, Swedes are clearly much more likely to be brown-eyed than Finns (although of course in 1927 Swedish authors would've had a habit of classifying identical mixed eyes as "blue" or "brown" depending on whether they're told the person is Swedish or Finnish...), but there's obviously heavy regional bias in what I've seen. The difference isn't that big, though, so very accurate surveys would be needed and newer ones seem pretty nonexistent (but IMO the pattern is roughly as shown in the map: brown eyes are more common in southern Sweden and, more generally, blue eyes are the most common in the whole eastern Baltic, brown eyes more common in Scandinavia).

Saamis shouldn't make much of an impact on the percentage for all of Sweden. Their proportion is already tiny and then you have to take a further proportion to those Saami with brown eyes.

I wouldn't expect them to actually make a difference, for the reasons you state. But perhaps they decided some of the swarthier types were 'Saami' or 'Finnish mongols' or whatever...

It has been mentioned here in passing that southern Sweden would have the highest proportion of people with _both_ blue eyes and blonde hair. Yet S. Swedes should be closely related to Danes, and have admixture from Germany as well. Is there some substance to the claim, or is it just a legend? It doesn't show on the hair and eye color maps, but those are probably not too accurate, either.

There's a mannish facial type among the swedish girls on the HotOrNot site linked in the above comments. I suppose some men might find them attractive, but I certainly don't.

The Swedish girls who aren't of that type seem about as attractive as the random Finnish girls on irc-galleria, in a fairly different way.

"Speaking about "Danish influence" sounds strange."

Yes!

Sloppy of me...

Especially, as the people of Scania for ages have lived under conditions much more similar to those of Denmark, than for instance central Sweden.

But, if danes have a slightly higher prevalence of darker eyes, then the historically very strong connections between Scania & present day Denmark should have had an impact, if ever so small...

On this map by Lundman (a co-worker of Lundborg) 1940 (found on a dodgy website) Scania is intermediate between neighbouring Denmark & Småland...

http://www.snpa.nordish.net/bild...per- karta03.jpg

But of course the differences are small...

My point was really that the map in the Frost discussion was somewhat inaccurate, but I guess we all knew that...besides, some actual numbers are always interesting, right?

"I hate it when people point out how many Swedes have moved to Finland without pointing out/realizing the flow to the other direction"

I know about the flow in the other direction, maybe I should have made that clear!

But, for historical reasons as well as my ad hoc expectations of genetic influences the flow from sweden to finland is likely to have had larger impact and should hence be more interesting...but, I dont mind if you prove me wrong!

"Only 5 % of Swedes had brown eyes?"

The results of a similiar study a quarter of a century earlier gave 4% as a number...

Sure, quite a few of those classified as marbled/mixed probably have a mix of brown (with green I guess). The Lundman map gives as a clue, as he classifies light & marbled/mixed eyes as "1-8 on the Martin-Schultz" scale...of course I dont have a clue to what that means...maybe someone here does?

"I assume even 'lower races' such as Saami and Finns had to go to the army in 1927 Sweden?"

I would assume so as well, cant imagine they were exempt...though, I am not sure to whom you attribute "lower race"...

And:

Yes!

I know that neither Lundborg nor Lundman have a very good reputation today, due to their views on topics such as racial hygien etc. But their studies does seem to be the only reasonable reliable available for Sweden...despite all I expect them to be able to record eye & hair color pretty well.

"But their studies does seem to be the only reasonable reliable available for Sweden"

When it comes to raw data that is...

But, for historical reasons as well as my ad hoc expectations of genetic influences the flow from sweden to finland is likely to have had larger impact and should hence be more interesting...but, I dont mind if you prove me wrong!

It's hard to say, but the Finn Y-chromosome study a couple of posts ago said Finns hadn't much of the R1b haplogroup. It's not the majority group in Sweden, either, but I think it shows the gene flow from Swedes to Finns hasn't been overwhelming after Swedes acquired R1b. (since we would expect slightly more Swedish men + Finnish women encounters than the other way around, Y-chromosomes should be sensitive indicators)

"Only 5 % of Swedes had brown eyes?"
The results of a similiar study a quarter of a century earlier gave 4% as a number...

Everything's possible, but my impression from Sweden is brown eyes aren't that rare. Will have to look more closely...

Considering all the Scottish, Dutch, French, German, Belgian,... tradesmen and noblemen who moved into Sweden before 1900s and must have had a considerable number of brown-eyes, wouldn't the original stock need to be 99% blue-eyed to achieve those numbers? :-)

I couldn't access the "nordish" map, btw.

see my post the 'golden error'. a high frequency of blue eyes might be maintained if the exogenous input was sequestered to port cities. one thing, if the map of sweden of eye color was frequency by county/subdivision, groups like saami could make a big impact in sparsely populated regions....

windy:

It has been mentioned here in passing that southern Sweden would have the highest proportion of people with _both_ blue eyes and blonde hair. Yet S. Swedes should be closely related to Danes, and have admixture from Germany as well. Is there some substance to the claim, or is it just a legend?

Sounds like "legend" to me. I didn't even know that blondes could be brown-eyed before I met such Swedes. That is, of the people I've met, the number of Swedish brown-eyed blondes >> the number of Finnish brown-eyed blondes, even though obviously the number of Finnish blondes I've met >> the number of Swedish blondes I've met. In fact, I don't think I've *ever* known a blonde with brown eyes that I would know for sure to be a Finn and not a Finland-Swede. (Not that my sample sizes are very meaningful, of course - the odds are that given *any* classification into a minority as small as "blondes", I wouldn't know a brown-eyed Finn from it... but a classification "both blonde hair and blue eyes" distinct from just "blonde hair" sounds very unnecessary, because to me blondes with non-blue eyes seem so rare that there's unlikely to be a difference to the proportion of just blonde haired people that could be reasonably measured without a very large sample.)

I would suggest that this is because Finns have been more separated for long from numerous populations with common brown eyes, so Swedes (and Finland-Swedes) have brown eyes more commonly as an "old" feature which isn't as likely to be associated with other traits, while it's more common for me to see brown eyes associated with recent migrants from less blonde regions. Ie. where I'm from, brown eyes usually also meant "gypsy", "Nordic" or otherwise alien looks.

In any case, blue eyes are not the same thing as blonde hair and there's no particular reason to expect that their distribution would be the same. IMHO, from what I've seen (traveling samples aren't of course unbiased)...

It doesn't show on the hair and eye color maps, but those are probably not too accurate, either.

...the maps quoted do have the rough features for light eyes right: there are regions where light eyes are essentially fixated, mostly on the eastern Baltic (in non-northern Finland, the Baltic states, some areas of Russia) but also in central Sweden; in Germany blue eyes seem most common in the northeast; so on, the general appearance seems right, even if the precise borders likely have inaccuracies. Scandinavians in general are IMO clearly more commonly dark-eyed than Finns, but a regional subset of *Swedes* that cuts off the extreme south and the north is about the same.

It's much more difficult to have a grasp on hair colour...

Björn:

But, if danes have a slightly higher prevalence of darker eyes, then the historically very strong connections between Scania & present day Denmark should have had an impact, if ever so small...

Yes, but my point was that there has probably never been a strong boundary on this. I don't think there ever has been any sustained barrier for intermarriage between Danes and Scanians or Scanians and their "Swedish" neighbours, despite political barriers. The dialect has likely always changed gradually (even though people now insist that the southern dialects in Sweden are Swedish, if the Danes conquered Scania back tomorrow they would immediately declare the local dialect to be Danish) and the areas haven't spent a very long time under a different religion or had any similarily strong barrier.

But, for historical reasons as well as my ad hoc expectations of genetic influences the flow from sweden to finland is likely to have had larger impact

Oh - why? What's now Sweden had the more prosperous parts of the kingdom and the power centers. Which way do you see the most significant migration flows running now - do people move from the poorer parts of the world to the more prosperous and more powerful parts or do they move from the more prosperous and more powerful parts to the poorer parts?

Of course, things would've been somewhat different back when imperialism was still fashionable and pro-immigrant activism wasn't, but I don't see why the motivation wouldn't have worked the same way - people in "Finland" would've been more often been eager to move to "Sweden" than vice versa, because "Sweden" was the nicer part. My point was, people have a habit of looking at historical interactions like this and simply declaring that "the X were historically socioeconomically dominant in X-Y interactions, so they left the bigger genetic impact on Y", with an invisible (and wrong) premise in the deduction stating that "the economically dominant culture leaves a bigger genetic influence on the less dominant one". It doesn't work that way - people try to switch from the poorer culture into the dominant one, not the other way around!

But then, if you're tracing genetics, you'll also run into ancient connections that predate "Swedes" and "Finns" as groups, and in those times fortunes may have been different. There are eg. loanwords in Finnish clearly testifying about Finnic-Gothic intermarriages and I think they suggest an imbalance towards mating of Finnic males and Gothic females.

In any case, blue eyes are not the same thing as blonde hair and there's no particular reason to expect that their distribution would be the same. IMHO, from what I've seen (traveling samples aren't of course unbiased)...

blue eyes seem to be on a different locus than those that control blonde hair. blonde hair has some genetic linkage with skin color (though not perfect), while blue eyes seems totally unliked (a prediction from this would be that that a greater % of mixed-race brazilians would have blue eyes than blonde hair when you project from simple admixture between southwest european whites and blacks).

I was able to open Björn's eye color map now. I can access it when I type the link, but not when I click on it directly - go figure.

http://www.snpa.nordish.net/bild...per- karta03.jpg

Actually, all Nordic areas are pretty similar, only differing by a few percent units, and I'd say the "marbled" category must include a fair amount of brown-eye-color-gene bearers. So perhaps with a different classification system the map would look more realistic.

On the other hand, if this map is taken to reflect real clines in eye color, there are a couple of suspicious things. Like Jaakkeli said, would Estonians and Latvians really be more dark-eyed than Swedes, especially in 1927? And why would the Swedish west coast be free from those influences, that supposedly have spread slightly darker eyes to coastal Norway and Denmark?

To find out more about the historical patterns of light eyes in Europe, I think looking at the different subtypes of 'light eyes' would be more helpful. I'd say the most common eye color in Finland is actually light grey or bluish grey - I guess it's not completely resolved whether that's just a variant of blue, or if some other alleles are at play?

I'd say the most common eye color in Finland is actually light grey

If what you mean by that are non-green and non-brown eyes that don't seem to have blue in them, such eyes are very rare (um... do they actually exist?). (I think most of the "grey eyes" stuff is again just old nonsense invented by people baffled over how is it possible that the Mongols have light eyes.)

or bluish grey - I guess it's not completely resolved whether that's just a variant of blue, or if some other alleles are at play?

Oh, it's obviously polygenic, the stuff about the eye colour gene with a blue allele and a brown allele is just a fiction of high school biology. Pigment-wise, blueness in eyes means lack of pigment and anything with blue is most definitely a "variant" of that. What kind of a variant (certain level of the different pigments - all non-albinos likely have some non-zero levels - or especially low levels of pigment? or is there something else about the eye giving slightly different looks?), well, beats me. My guess is that the colour most common in Finns is simply a type that you get with minimal pigment in the eye (why? well, I used to know this dude who had no colour in any of his hair and he had the usual Finnish eyes...).

The different kinds of blue eyes that people still call blue are likely actually slightly mixed eyes that people count as blue when they don't notice the mixedness. Mixed eyes are more common than most people think they are - you can identify a lot more of them if you look at eyes exposed to very bright light to make the pupil minimal.

If you meant that the lightness would've been arrived at through different evolutionary pathways, that would actually be very nice to eg. attempt to explain how lightness could've become so common quickly. The Baltic Sea region was recolonized after glaciation by peoples from very different directions. If they had already arrived to some level of lightness through different ways, a mixing of the populations would've produced people combining both ways and people lacking both ways, ie. it would produce very convenient fodder for selection. (If so, this of course should show up as identifiable patterns in the distribution once they actually manage to figure out the inheritance of lightness and map the gene stuff.)

If what you mean by that are non-green and non-brown eyes that don't seem to have blue in them, such eyes are very rare (um... do they actually exist?).

I meant the 'dishwater' color. I guess sometimes it's open to interpretation if there's any blue...

My guess is that the colour most common in Finns is simply a type that you get with minimal pigment in the eye

Yes, there seem to be speculations that light blue/grey eyes have recessive alleles in all the eye color genes, and bright blue eyes have simply one dominant allele more than that.

If you meant that the lightness would've been arrived at through different evolutionary pathways, that would actually be very nice to eg. attempt to explain how lightness could've become so common quickly.

Exactly, instead of trying to pinpoint one center of light eyes in N. Europe, the mixing interpretation might be more interesting.

Swedish girls are the best looking girls in the world. A revelation. I married one in a Swedish church a few years ago.

But, if you want sexy girls you need to go to Australia. Australian girls are much more extroverted, and as a result, to me, they have greater sex appeal. Down here, in summer, the girls hardly wear any clothes. The last thing you'll notice is eye colour.

Down here, in summer, the girls hardly wear any clothes. The last thing you'll notice is eye colour.

...but you'll notice hair colour? At least whether it's a real blonde or not?

"but you'll notice hair colour? At least whether it's a real blonde or not?"

Yes the carpet is less likely to match the curtains down here.

Not all young girls are pretty. But all old women look like horse.
And Tarja Halonen is oooooold. Victoria is young.
Personally, Conan O'brien is more attractive than Halonen (the old EU capitalist commie).
Women have a shelf life from 16 to 30 years. After menopause at the age of about 45.. run and cover your ears.
Halonen is about 60, she's got backpains, she yells and has tantrums, , can barely straddle along, doesn't hear too well and can't friggin speak finnish. The bish in the lingerie is about 25 or so. And she's got silicones. Who's gonna win. This got nothing to do with nationalities but old bish vs new bish. And the new bish always wins.

This isn't very correct conversation. The comparison is stupid, who'd want to compare a hooker and a president? Some stupid swede?

That's so vain!