Factors Influencing Perception of Facial Attractiveness: Gender and Dental Education

Purpose: This study was conducted to investigate the gender- and dental education-specific differences in perception of facial attractiveness for varying ratio of lower face contour. Methods: Two hundred eleven students (110 male respondents and 110 female respondents; aged between 20–38 years old) were requested to rate facial figures with alterations to the bigonial width and the vertical length of the lower face. We produced a standard figure which is based on the "golden ratio" and 4 additional series of figures with either horizontal or vertical alterations to the contour of lower face. The preference for each figure was evaluated using a Visual Analog Scale. The Kruskal Wallis test was used for differences in the preferences for each figure and the Mann–Whitney U test was used to evaluate gender-specific differences and differences by dental education. Results: In general, the highest preference score was indicated for the standard figure, whereas facial figure with large bigonial width and chin length had the lowest score. Male respondents showed significantly higher preference score for facial contour that had a 0.1 proportional increase in the facial height-bigonial width ratio over that of the standard figure. For horizontal alterations to the facial profiles, there were no significant differences in the preferences by the level of dental education. For vertically altered images, the average Visual Analog Scale was significantly lower among the dentally-educated for facial image that had a proportional 0.22 and 0.42 increase in the ratio between the vertical length of the chin and the lip. Conclusion: Generally, the standard image based on the golden ratio was the most. Slender face was appealed more to males than to females, and facial image with an increased lower facial height were perceived to be much less attractive to the dentally-educated respondents, which suggests that the dental education might have some influence in sensitivity to vertical changes in lower face.

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