Morena

Velia was one of my colleagues when I was working in Manila. She had a bubbly personality, a shiny smile (she had braces back then), and she sported a chocolate complexion due to many activities under the sun. To put the long story short, if I had known she was a rarity back then, she would have been the ultimate crush. 

When I came back to Davao, I began working among fair-skinned women. With the exception of Ma'am Jocelyn and Ma'am Beth, my other lady bosses and colleagues were from affluent families and it showed through their pearly white skin. 

Most of our clients in the bank also sported the same look: gleaming, white complexion from a combination of genetics, facials, glutathione products, and avoidance of the sun. 

Looking back, I began forming a hunch as to why foreigners typically perceive beauty as a woman with dark skin. Aside from the obvious fact that foreigners often perceive dark-skinned women as 'exotic' or at least different from the white Caucasian women they're accustomed to, they also perceive dark-skinned women as inherently healthier than their fair counterparts. 

Call this perception The-sporty-girl bias and the bias simply deduces that a physically active and fit woman is most likely a woman of dark skin. Why? That's most probably because being healthy  in our climate invariably means going outdoors and getting dark. For foreigners, this notion of good health is ultimately tied with their concept of beauty and sexiness. 

Anyways, these are just conjectures and anyone can prove them wrong anytime. But there is also one reason why I think dark women are more beautiful: they're comfortable under their own skin. Most of these women I've known are self-assured and that level of self-esteem is difficult to see nowadays. You'd likely see girls fretting about looking for shade than women happily basking underneath the sun. For dark skinned women, conforming to societal norms on what 'beauty' should be (e.g. pale, flawless skin, no blemish etc.) is no way to live a life. 

For me, that's sexy.