A security guard stands on duty after the opening session of the Chinese People's Political Consultative Conference in Beijing's Great Hall of the People, China, Thursday, March 3, 2011.Ng Han Guan/AP
Stock photography databases? It's time to change your game plan. The early middle-aged caucasian male with brown hair should no longer be the go-to "average guy." At least, not if you're catering to a global market.
According to National Geographic, the most typical-looking person in the world is a 28-year-old Han Chinese man.
The magazine spent a year researching world populations and, after calculating the world's more predominant sex (male), median age (28) and largest ethnic group (Han Chinese), researchers analyzed 190,000 faces to create a composite of the "the world's most typical person" (and yes, yes, we know the method they used to create the composite might not be truly scientific in your view).
In two decades, Mr.28-year-old-Han-Chinese-Man will be replaced with another composite. Demographers guess that by 2030, that title of "most typical" will go to someone from India.
It's around that time (2031 to be exact, according to projections from Statistics Canada) that visible minorities in Canada will make up one-third of the country's total population. In keeping with National Geographic's predictions for world population growth, South Asians will be the most predominant faces among visible minorities.
Istanbul-based photographer Mike Mike had the same idea as National Geographic when he created Faces of Tomorrow, a photo project that shows "the face" of cities around the world using composite photos of individual residents. Click through to see how immigration patterns have changed "the face" of a city such as Amsterdam.
Dakshana Bascaramurty