Vogue

I want to make it clear up front that I too could be 5’10”, gorgeous, blonde, slim, athletic, and have incredible fashion sense, but I choose not to. I prefer to stand out from the crowd and be unique in my brunette, short, chubby brilliance. After all, in a land where the “ugly girls” are at least a seven and still rate a wolf whistle, it’s hard to compete.

Over the past many years, I have travelled around the world and seen some of the most beautiful women on the planet. Ethiopian women far and away top the list for me, while friends who visited me in Kenya put the local women in Nairobi in highest esteem. In India, I saw some true beauties but also a lot of women who put a lot of effort into achieving that “natural” look. Most European women I’ve seen also fall into that category.

Perhaps that’s why Norwegian women vex me so much. In any other country, they would be hounded by modeling agencies but here they’re just average. Yes, I lived in a country filled with Heidi Klum lookalikes. Isn’t that just great for a girl’s ego?

It never ceases to amuse me that in North America people joke about the “Swedish Hot Tub Team.” Obviously those men have never met the world’s genetic lottery winners – Norwegian women.

Yet it isn’t simply their tall, gorgeous, blondness that people notice. (And I have yet to meet a man who doesn’t drool over those qualities.) As a woman, what I notice is the fact that Norwegian women have an innate sense of style of fashion that I will likely never achieve even if taken in hand by Stella McCartney herself. Women there pull on a pair of casual leggings, a long sweater, and tie the outfit together with a pair of knee high boots with a casual elegance that appears to be second nature. I’ve seen women elsewhere try to pull off the fashion statements that Oslo’s inhabitants seem to wear with such grace but it simply doesn’t work. You can tell the also-rans are trying.

People more cynical than myself might point out that there are a lot of salons in Oslo that specialize in colouring hair, or that women are that thin because lutefisk just doesn’t taste that good. Women with a more salacious eye than I would also observe that the population distribution of hotness in Norway is spread equally between the sexes. But I think I’ll just bask in my uniquely short stature, brown hair, and complete lack of ability to match clothes knowing that I’m unique duck in this flock of swans.

Author's Note: It was only after writing this post I discovered that I didn't actually have any photos of hot Norwegian women in their natural habitat. Sorry boys!