Why are some Polish people dark complected, and others very light

I'm one of the dark ones :)

My sister is strawberry blond with blue eyes, and I'm a brunette with brown eyes. We both look completely different and yet people almost always know that the both of us are Polish.

He could be Jewish. Since they come from Israel they have a darker complexion, or he could be of ethnic Turkish origin or Tartar or Cossack etc.

im a light one LOL! i got blonde hair blue eyes and fair skin

What happened to the original question ?
Poland is a nation, therefore Poles are a Nationality group.
Being Jewish refers to a Religious group.
Racial group originally was a larger group which had similar physical characteristics;
more recently that has become skin color. the problem is there are millions who don't fit into any group: or for their own issues others put them into a different group.

That'll be the Romanians.

More recently it has become genes.Poles are the purest Slavs by DNA.

My father looked like your typical Santa Claus! High cheekbones, moustache (of course - but no beard) He had high cheekbones, blue eyes and fine fairish/brown straight hair. I look very like him but without the moustache! I have fair skin but tan very easily.

My grandparents, however, from the one photo I have of them look darker and have a different physiognomy, they don't look as slavic. As my father was married before, I have a half sister who has almost jet black wavy hair and dark grey eyes and looks more like our grandparents than she does our Dad.

And I recently was very attracted to a Kurd who I met while I was buying an apartment in Turkiye of all places! Felt very in tune with him for some reason.

You see that there are dominant genes which can be predominant over others?Polish genes remained only although there were english,irish and dutch ancestors as well.This as an answer to some smartasses who think that there is no way some genes can dominate over others.

Also please.Skin colour has to do with exposure to sun.If Poles emigrated to some region with lots of sunshine like Egypt,they would have become darker after some generations.It is natural selection mechanism.Finns and Hungarians had common ancestors.Despite that Finns now have lighetr skin colour than Hungarians because they live in a place with much less sunshine.

Be reasonable.Colour is not very important.It changes easily according to place.What is important are the facial and body characterisics,especially the length/width of nose ratio,the length of nose/width of splachnic cranium ratio and many other indexes which differ between different nationalities.

my dad was dark skin polish too. dark hair skin and eyes. last name chicaleski. i have wondered what he was mixed with as well because i see so much fair polish people... christachicaleski@hotmail his parents came over in 1920s he was born in 1933

We are mostly of Nordic blood (blond to light brown hair and blue or gray eyes) with an admixture of Alpine blood. This is primarily due to the fact that we've mixed for centuries with Nordic people like the Scandinavians who conquered the Slavic people in todays Poland Ukraine and Russia in the 800's before Poland existed. Later we've mixed with Germans for centuries, and also with Ukranians, other ethnic groups had a slight impact on our outlook.

Pale white polack here and loving it! 100% pure ;)

How do you figure philly boy since I find the most common hair colour in POland is brown. I have never seen a pole with Scandinavian / Nordic features only a few with German but that was because one of their parents was germ

Good day -

It's all in the Genes (as it were) ! Those who posted comments concerning genetic interaction pretty-much answered the question in terms associated with DNA.

To add two general points -

1. A very great portion of the peoples who migrated into the plains of Polonia did so through the Near East which proved favorable with respect to interculturation, intermarriage and procreation. As a group moving forward, certain individual DNA became slightly "modified".

2. The Mongol Invasions into Poland, Hungary, Russia and others, circa 1240 AD were, logically, responsible for another DNA modification, especially when one considers that during occupation, marriage was not considered an obstacle to human procreation.

At this point, with massive infusion of Mongol DNA into a group already containing Near East DNA modification, the phrase "Latent Genetics" developed {Hidden Genetics} which is still valid today.

If the DNA [YDNA & MTDNA] of a Polish Mother and Father are receptive, sometimes these latent (hidden) genetics trigger an occurance that reflects some of the physical traits of a Family ancestor(s) who were forced to procreate and in some cases where their children were forced to procreate as well during the long occupation.

2.

Dom means Gipsy.

Granpa I great points.

And Guest, who ever you are. No I do not. Even so why do you call them Gipsy, not Polish?

DomPolski, The Germans(Saxons to be exact)of northern Germany are Nordic people just like the Scandinavians are, Scandinavia and Germany are where all people who have Nordic phisical traits (Blond hair blue eyes tall stature) originate. Scandinavians mixed with Russians Ukranians, Germans with Poles, and Czechs. About 1/3 of Poles are pure Nordic , and 70% have at least one Nordic trait. originally all Slavs looked like Byelorussians (Bialorusini) who mostly have brown hair and eyes, and are believed to be of the the purest Slavic blood. does that answer all ur questions??

Why would Belarussians be purest Slavs? Did they not get to mix with others over history? I don't see any barriers.....

*scratches head*

Good day to the list ~

So far, those associated with such things are unable to gain wide acceptance of an accurate definition or a root source for the word "Slav". You can run a google search and read about their efforts.

In essence, as migrating peoples moved into Europe, a rather large group of individuals, who called themselves Slavs, banded together during their migration and therefore arrived together (more or less) as "One".

They had their own language, a general and somewhat common YDNA sequence, and for the most part experienced all the trials, tribulations, love, and joy associated with any group of immigrants into a "new" country.

As time passed, the Slavic Empire grew to such proportions that it actually got too big and started fracturing into splinter groups who moved outward into newer lands.

The first splinter group is called "Southern Slav's" and consisted of todays Bulgaria, Serbia, Montenegro, Croatia, Bosnia Herzegovina, Slovenia, and Macedonia.

The second group is called the "Western Slav's" which consists of todays Czech Republic, Slovakia, Poland, and Sorbia.

The last and biggest group were the "Eastern Slav's", which consists of todays Belarush, Russia, and the Ukraine.

Each group went away with a common language, the Slavic language. As the centuries passed, each group modified the Mother language by changing words, verbage, grammatics, all to suit themselves, their geographics and the pecularities of their location and their individuality.

Today we all consider each language separate and distinct, however, they all stem from a common past. That's why if you speak a Slavic language today, such as Polish, and with some great difficulty you may be able to carry on a limited conversation with say, a Russian.

In the absence of the written word through the early centuries, a simple story has been passed down, Father to Son, common to all Slavic groups mentioned above. It was first found as a written script in 1125 :

--From their Father, the boys left to seek their place in life ~ Czech, Lech, and Russ. They traveled together and eventually found themselves at the banks of the Elbe river. Here Czech settled, starting a large Family and bid his brothers farewell.

Lech and Russ found their way into the turf swamps of the Valdai Hills, the headwaters of the Volga River. Here Russ settled and his children were more numerous than the fingers of both his hands. He bid Lech success in his travels.

Lech eventually came into the lands of Polonia, near what today is the area around Gniezno. As he stood proudly to survey the land for agriculture, a lone tree towards the West caught his attention. Basked in the red glow of the last rays of the setting sun, he spied a White Eagle in branch of the tree.

Here, he thought, I will settle. From this moment onward the White Eagle on a red background is the National Symbol of Poland.

As far as skin color and hair goes, My brother looks like the typical slav: Blond hair, blue eyes, high cheek bones, stronger facial features...I am dark hair (brown, almost black, curly hair) Brown/hazel eyes, and I have olive coloured skin.

When me and my brother were younger, people would ask my mother if we had the same father!

People constantly ask if I'm Greek, Italian, or Spanish...

My fathers side is 100% polish--all have light eyes, and most with dark hair.
My mother side is Spanish--She's a red head with Hazel eyes.

In my family there are two girls and two boys. My sister keeps being asked if she is Spanish and my younger brother is a towhead with blue eyes. The rest are brown hair and brown or hazel eyes. My mom has dark hair and dark eyes and my dad (bald very early age) so we can't tell about him...LOL... but blue eyes. Mix it all up and you get what you get.

Well here, I have bluish eyes, dark hair, but very light skin. Like, very very light. I am Greek but people always do ask me whether I am from somewhere else. People have mistaken me for Finnish, Swedish, Polish, Russian....essentially many of the generalization made upon looks and cultures tend not to hold.

in the winter im whiter than a piece of paper but in the summer i can get pretty dark, like as dark as one of my mexican friends but then sometimes i will get a freackle or two so i dont really like the sun

I know white people with brown skin because of sun and food and the person I'm picturing is the father of one Polish friend i have , he has this yellow color on him as you described too and that's because his skin was so damage that it tries to get back to his original color but it can't also because of the diet he has (coke,junk food,etc)...... i also want to add that Polish people are mix of Slavs, Nordic, Mediterraneans and Tartars who are Asian type people or (primitive Mongol) pale skin, average height and obviously those kind of eyes.

well Slavic people aren't the one with blonde hair and blue eyes and hard features those are the NORDICS........... Slavs are the mix of the same Tartars, Nordic but originally the same as the Mediterraneans but they spread in 2 different directions back then and the ones that got into what is now Greece ,Italy ,France and Spain got that olive color because of sun and the food you eat in this areas like carots and olives, while the other ones that got into Russia,Belarus,Ukraine,... were in a different environment and had other sources of food.

my family is polish and there is definitely a mix. We all have dark hair now, but my dad and his brother were born blond. My grandmother and I both have olive skin. My dad and I also have course, curly hair that nobody else in the family has.

You people are all so very fascinating .I'm so glad I found this website.It gives me very unique perspectives I would never have heard in my entire life without it.

I will post the links if others ask and when I find them. I've read genetic studies that show that it's the Poles who are:

1.) More homogenous in genetic descent
2.) Far closer in descent to the original ancestral Slavs/ the old Indo Europeans who developed into Slavs, who first settled the areas in E. Europe after the Goths and Celts moved through them!

3.) It is the genetic population group that later became the Germans/Slavs and Baltic people (the "Nordic type" of people) who are still today most concentrated and pure in Poland!

Lol, so don't tell that to any Germans! Jk of course.

Of course, I only look at genetics for the anthro side of things. We know how crazy people have taken this scientific data and twisted it for their racist reasons.

jajajaja, I'm pretty sure they have plenty of olives and carrots in Poland and not just the Mediterraneans as I have lived long in Poland.

My Grandmother imagrated from poland and she was short and dark with black hair and she was voluptous, people always though she was puerto rican, my dad looked just like her and so does my sister, I'm fair skinned with light brown hair, but I got the super dark brown eyes. My grandma said dark polish people are from the hills of poland, she called us polish hillbillies, her last name was jelen which means deer in polish.

The guy who opened the thread seriously needs a brain.

People look different because they are of different origin. Poles who look darker might have other genes going on than those who are light and blond.

95 percent of Poles have very fair complexion.By this alone you can distinguish them from southern Slavs(when I have problem distinguishing a Serbian from a polish girl I just observe the degree of whiteness as last resort).(I recognize Greek girls by looking at their hairy arms.Polish do not have dark hair in arms).