In some countries where there's a lot of diversity in terms of phenotype, like Italy, for example, or even, perhaps, France, there isn't ONE phenotype which defines what Italians look like. It depends whether you're in southern or northern Italy, even northwest versus northeast. Sardinia is different altogether. Northwest Italians look more "southern French like", northern Lombards more central European, northeastern Italians a bit Slavic, some southern Italians look more Greek like, some overlap with people even further east. Some, I do agree, seem to me as if they couldn't be anything but Italian, but I've never seen a non Italian who is able to pick them out.
I remember one discussion I had with someone where I said the idea that Italians are always long and narrow faced, a supposedly "Mediterranean" trait, was completely incorrect. Otherwise, how then could Luca Zingaretti be explained? He certainly isn't an exception in Italy. He couldn't look more Italian of a certain type, and yet, he doesn't look like that at all. In fact, he looks a great deal like my paternal grandfather, although he's a Roman.
If a certain phenotype represents, say, 20- 30% of the people of Italy taken as a whole it's not an "exception". To say someone who looks like that 20% of the population doesn't look "Italian", is insulting as well as being incorrect. It also leads people to be consistently wrong in "guessing" the nationality of certain Italians, although that's just a game.
There's no substitute for living in and extensively traveling in a country. As a corollary, relying on old plates is a very bad idea, imo. They were chosen by people operating out of their own subjective pre-conceptions from what I can tell. They can't even decide on the nomenclature, or the definitions. At least genetics shows the very large variation in Italians. All people need to do is look at the "space" we occupy on a PCA set at normal standards.
As for the woman I posted here, I posted her because I was so surprised that she was of Finnish descent, and I was just sharing that surprise. I also thought either I'd learn she was indeed part of the normal spectrum there, or she was not. Either way, it was meant to be fun, and secondarily to jolt people a bit out of their certainty that certain stereotypes should be relied upon.
What I do know for a certainty is that she indeed looks a LOT like my mother: head shape, face shape, eye shape, everything, as well as coloring and body build, and no, my mother is NOT an exception in our province. This Finnish woman may indeed be an exception in Finland. I don't know one way or another because I've never been there.