European beauty standards didn't really alter to accommodate the presence of women of color. Artistic depictions of individuals meant to be designated as people of color often chose to compromise between the visual elements designating their subjects as "different" and the preexisting visual conventions of Eurocentric attractiveness -- for instance, a perfume-bottle illustration of a good-looking Native American couple dressed in in a European artist's estimation of Native attire might still depict the figures' faces and bodies as conforming to European ideals regarding skintone, body shape, etc. Darker skin and non-European facial contours are right out. But where European and non-European cultures met, we can get a sense of how individuals evaluated one another in terms of their own beauty standards.

Accounts by European travelers often remark on non-European dress and also on the travelers' personal impressions of the appearances of women they encounter. Florentine businessman Francesco Carletti's writings describe sixteenth-century Nagasaki and Macau in some detail -- architecture, geography, politics, material culture, food and drink, as well as people.

The fashion is the same for men and women, but they vary according to the age. Silk dresses were made in various colours; normally the poor wears blue, red or black garments made of cotton, white is reserved for mourning. The clothes were placed one over the other. They wrap their shameful parts in some cotton cloth. The beautiful Japanese women clearly fascinated him: “reasonably white”, “with tiny eyes” and “black teeth” 48 (fl.126). They also tint their hair black, very far from the aesthetic canons imposed by the Renaissance: “golden hair [and] ivory white teeth” (fl.124). Men are hairless, and they are used to “wear the hair somewhat long, with that of the temples from the middle of the head down toward the nape of the neck and bound neatly together behind, so that it resembles a plume, and they trim the ends of this hair, which they comb and retie every morning” (fls.128-129).

• "16th Century Japan and Macau Described by Francesco Carletti (1573-1636)", Elisabetta Colla

The phrase "reasonably white" is conspicuous, but you can see other comparisons and assessments between Italian beauty standards of that century -- pale skin, white teeth, curly blonde hair -- and the innate characteristics of the Japanese women he sees as well as his perception of those characteristics in relation to beauty, what Japanese viewers find beautiful and what he finds beautiful. The Early Modern Japanese fashion for teeth-blackening was remarked on by other European commentators besides Carletti; it seems to have been especially striking. In general, European commentators during the 16th and 17th centuries speak favorably of Japanese people's physical "whiteness" as well as aspects of Japanese culture and character that align with European norms and expectations, often in direct comparison with other "inferior" Asian nationalities like Cambodians, Indians, and the Chinese. The perceived conformity of Japanese features like skintone to European standards is used as a device to emphasize the Japanese as superior to other non-whites and indeed near-European, at the same time as writers like Carletti scrutinize cultural and national differences.

Carletti was a slave trader, and in his writings he also assesses the visual appeal of Japanese and Korean slaves through that lens:

“The country of Korea is said to be divided into nine provinces [...] From these provinces, but particularly from those nearest to the coast, had been brought as slaves a large number of men and women of all ages, among them some quite pretty children. These were all being sold indifferently at a very cheap price, and I bought as many as five for a little more than twelve scudi.

Another Jesuit commentator, Sebastião Gonçalves, bluntly echoes Carletti's remarks on hair color: "They detest blond hair and dye it black." I'm not sure if this really refers to a specific practice, or is more an attempt to account for uniformly-dark hair color in the Japanese population.

A later Dutch commentator, John Saris, has this to say about the women he encounters in Japan circa 1613: they are

attired in gownes of silke, clapt the one skirt over the other, and so girt to them, bare-legged, only a paire of halfe buskins bound with silke riband about their instep: their hair very blacke, and very long, tyed up in a knot upon the crowne in a comely manner ... they were well-faced, handed and footed: cleare-skind and white, but wanting colour, which they amend by arte. Of stature low, but very fat; very courteous in behavior.

Again -- black hair, "well-faced" women with white skin, and the use of cosmetics. (Though the "artful" use of cosmetics -- in this case maybe blush? -- wouldn't be alien to European sensibilities.) His remarks that Japanese women are "very fat" may describe actual physical differences in the group of women he did encounter, or a different physical appearance without the constraint of the wardrobe underpinnings that would be commonplace in Europe, and without the emphasis in garment construction on the smallness of the waist. Other commentators reiterate descriptions of the blackness, glossiness, and length of Japanese women's hair, and of the shaven heads of Japanese men. By these accounts, rather than dyeing or treating dark hair to make it lighter as European women with dark hair may do, Japanese women intensify the darkness of their hair with eggwhite rinses -- and you're probably starting to get the picture vis-a-vis the image of Japanese beauty that's emerging here, described in terms of its "comely" similarities and its "strange" contrasts with the European ideal.

Comments on the physical appearances of actual non-European individuals show an assessment that emphasizes exotic difference while still praising aspects that fall in line with European aesthetic standards -- textual accounts of international visitors like Japanese delegations to Rome and Mexico City, or the celebrity presence of Pocahontas in 1616 England, aren't so much studies in European beauty standards changing to accommodate multiple models of ideal beauty as they are European cultural encounters with the exotic and strange. (It is not a coincidence that few or none of these non-European cultural ambassadors were non-aristocrats -- delegations of young Japanese men were selected not just for their individual hardiness and likeliness to survive the journey to the New World or to Europe, but for their samurai heritage and good breeding; Native American and First Nations visitors were described and characterized as "royalty", as princes and princesses of exotic courts and lands.) In short, though, the aesthetic judgments didn't go both ways -- Europeans scrutinized indigenous people's conformity to and adoption of European fashions and traits, but they didn't scrutinize themselves in terms of whether they met non-European standards of beauty, or adopt indigenous materials and fashions. Non-European materials might be eagerly adopted, but in the 16th and 17th century we're a long way from 19th-century Japonisme.

Other times, European beauty standards were synthesized with non-European beauty standards in depictions of mixed-race people -- such as depictions of Our Lady of Guadalupe where Mary is depicted with darker skin than the European standard, straight dark hair, mestiza features, and combination of traditional European Marian attire and traditional Mexican elements. This blurs the edges a little -- is this image of Mary a Europeanized gloss on indigenous features, or an exotification of European features? Are these images a cross-cultural encounter between indigenous and European aesthetics corresponding to the story of the Guadalupe apparition as an indigenous encounter with European Catholicism? The significance of Our Lady of Guadalupe and indigenous-ized depictions of Catholic figures says a lot about the relationship between colonizer and colonized -- this relationship was pretty damn fraught, but active on both sides.

Overall I'd describe encounters between European standards of beauty and non-European standards of beauty as significant but limited. These encounters basically always functioned along class lines as well as racial lines, due to European colonial activity wedding racial superiority to aristocracy and the acquisition of wealth. The area where European beauty standards were most unyielding was with regard to blackness -- while Portuguese colonials were confronted with the reality that the indigenous people they were trying to exploit might vary widely in appearance and complexion, the stigma against dark skin remained strong in Europe. This relates pretty strongly to slavery during this period -- sub-Saharan Africans were not the only people taken as slaves during the Early Modern period and not the only visible groups of slaves in places like Spain and Portugal. But the prevalence of enslavement of Africans, without a counterbalancing image of African aristocracy, led to the equating of blackness and of dark skin with low birth, commonness, slavishness, and barbarism.

Thank you!