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Filipino Appearance
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Are Filipinos dark or light skinned?
harvey115
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Are Filipinos dark or light skinned?
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Short answer is: Both. Filipinos are also brown, white, yellow and black. Indigenous people of the Philippines have dark brown to black skin color. Filipinos really come in different colours because of hundreds of years under Spain, early Chinese settlers, Americans during and after the war till present and how Filipinos spread out across the world decades ago and up to this day. Depending on which kind of area you look in, majority of Filipinos have brown to light brown skin. If you look in depressed areas, you’re more likely to see dark-skinned people, but the thing with our skin is, we darken quite easily. Even if you put us under the sun for only a few minutes. Those who are in depressed areas are always under the sun. Regular people in the middle class are a mix of people having dark brown, brown and light skin. Majority of which is still light brown to brown skin. Filipinos who have light skin are also common, but they are not the majority. They are common enough that they don’t stick out in a crowd. Usually, the ones with light skin come from a family with mixed heritage and their names are commonly Spanish. While the dark skinned Filipinos commonly have more Filipino sounding names, like mine. My mother has a Spanish name, she has light skin. While my father has a Filipino name and has light brown skin. I have brown to light brown skin. Sorry for talking about myself, but I guess I have no better example than myself because I am Filipino. And no, just because a Filipino has a Spanish name doesn’t mean he’s of Spanish descent. Spanish names were merely given to Filipinos during colonial times. So you will find short, dark-skinned Filipinos whose names would be like Hernandez or Alvarado. Filipinos also have it the other way around. Light skin with a Filipino sounding name. You’d have a better gauge if the Filipino is really partly Spanish if you look at the size and shape of the person’s nose. Of course, this isn’t always correct. This is just based on my personal observation from being Filipino and living in the Philippines, but almost half of the light-skinned people I’ve met in the country were of Chinese descent or at least partly East Asian, like half Japanese etc. So this is what I’ve seen from being in both a depressed area and in a regular middle income environment, where most people in the country are. Filipinos today are really a mix. However, the majority still has brown to light brown skin. But we are not a homogenous race, say, like the Japanese or the Koreans are.
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Just like the wide variation in accents (How does the Filipino accent sound like to non-Filipinos?), the Filipino look encompasses a wide range of appearance: What are some facial features of Filipinos? Outside the Philippines, I can pass for a Malay, pure Chinese, Latino, Italian, "white", "western". Steven de Guzman's answer to What's it like to be mistaken for being a different ethnicity than you actually are? To answer the question: Some Filipinos have dark skin, some Filipinos have light skin, and many are mostly in between. However, the interpretation depends on the observer. For example, an Indian would claim that Filipinos have a light skin color, but an Arab would most probably disagree.