We are what we are. If one's standard of what constitutes beauty is of white, white skin, that is what one will resonate to.

Like a friend of mine who left Alaska and moved to New Mexico. He was gone 7 or 8 years before he visited Alaska again. And you know what? He said he had forgotten how pretty white skin is. (And you can't get much farther from being racist than that man is.)

Maybe it is like regions where the norm of house colors and shades is earth tones. I've had people from the American Southwest tell me how pretty the houses in Juneau are - only because we have every conceivable color here.

But I have no doubt that if the people who grew up in the regulatory earth-toned houses were gone from them for years before they returned there, they would be agog at the beauty of home.