I don't think I could survive in the tropics.
As I've mentioned, my parents and then I had a condo in Florida, which is pretty tropical, for decades. I spent a week there in May one year, which is technically still spring, and lived to regret it. I was slathered in the strongest sun screen I could find, and wore a hat, but somehow just the reflected sunlight "burned" my eyes. The itching and watering were unbearable but when I went to the doctor thinking it was some new allergy he explained it and said I had to wear wrap around sunglasses when I went outdoors. Mine were too small and let in too much light.
In Mexico, at a hotel called Las Brisas, they provided you with little open sided jeeps with a cover. I thought for once I didn't need all that greasy cream. Well, the problem was I held onto the post for curves. That night my arm swelled up like a sausage. Doctors again.
The worst was in Cape May, New Jersey soon after I married. Like an idiot I wanted to get a little color on my face so I didn't put sun screen on it. I fell asleep for two hours or so on the beach with one cheek exposed. In the middle of the night, feeling an incredible tightness in my face I went to the bathroom and screamed and cried in absolute terror. My entire face was swollen like a monster's, eyes squeezed shut, and a brilliant red. The emergency room doctors had to give me shots of steroids and steroid cream and I spent the rest of the vacation in the darkened hotel room. After he treated me, the doctor proceeded to yell at me and tell me that if I didn't want to die young of melanoma I'd stay out of the sun.
So, my wish for one ancestral allele somewhere didn't stem from aesthetic considerations at all; I quite liked the color of my skin against my dark hair.
It was a question of it being a burden in a lot of situations.
The tropics are also not for me, unless they spray the hell out of it, because I'm a magnet for mosquitoes, sand fleas, you name it. Like an idiot, again, I wanted a "green" vacation, no nasty chemical spraying, yada, yada, yada, so once we went for a week to Caneel Bay in the Virgin Islands. Big, big mistake. The room was right on the beach, so we were outside sipping a pina colada on our lounge chairs watching the sunset. In the middle of the night I felt this horrible itching all over my legs. I was covered in thousands and thousands of bites. This time it was a black doctor in St. Thomas who had to treat me, with shots of penicillin, because I had impetigo from sand fleas. Meanwhile, my husband had turned a lovely brown and didn't have a single bite. I could happily have punched him.
Have you read the journals of Livingston and Stanley or other men like them of their explorations of Africa? On day 18 we lost Fowler, etc. etc. Well, that would have been me.
Pigmentation and all sorts of other traits are an adaptation to the environment: climate, altitude, food etc. There's nothing holy or objectively superior or inferior about any of it.
I seem to be adapted for mountain life and northern latitudes. It's just the roll of the genetic dice.