Why men prefer fair-skinned maidens and women like dark, handsome strangers

Kylie Minogue and Nicole Kidman

Gentlemen do not just prefer blondes, but lighter-skinned women in general, a study has suggested.

Scientists looking into attractiveness in men and women suggest that men from all races find fairer-skinned woman most alluring, while women are the polar opposite and favour darker, brooding men.

They said the attraction is driven by preferences based on moral assumptions.

Men are subconsciously attracted to fairer-skinned icons such as Nicole Kidman or Kylie Minogue because of the skin tone's association with innocence, purity, modesty, virginity, vulnerability and goodness.

Women, on the other hand, pick men with darker complexions - such as film stars Johnny Depp, Colin Farrell or Jamie Foxx - because these are associated with sex, virility, mystery, villainy and danger.

The latter two actors were paired together in the recent Miami Vice movie, which topped the box office on both sides of the Atlantic despite lukewarm reviews.

Academics at the University of Toronto in Canada say their study proves the fair maiden of myth has a basis in scientific reality.

They studied more than 2,000 advertising photographs and found that the skin of white women was 15.2 per cent lighter than the skin of white males, and the skin of black women 11.1 per cent lighter than the skin of black men.

Dr Shyon Baumann, a sociologist involved in the study, said: "What the research shows is that our aesthetic preferences operate to reflect moral preferences.

"Within our cultures we have a set of ideals about how women should look and behave.

"Lightness and darkness have particular meanings attached to them and we subconsciously relate those moral preferences to women."

In effect, men drawn to darker looking women - such as actress Monica Bellucci - are expressing a preference for danger.

Dr Baumann said this appreciation of a darker complexion in women is "less common" but "appears to coexist with a view of such women as more overtly sexual.