Facial attractiveness and lip morphology of Caucasian women

Lip color measurement: A new hyperspectral imaging device

INTRODUCTION

The lips are of significant interest among the facial features for self-perception and social interactions. Such perceptions could rely in part upon the contrast in color between the lips and the surrounding skin. In contrast to skin color, lip color ethnic diversity measurement provides a challenge and is less documented in the literature, most likely due primarily to challenges in measurement based upon the lip characteristics of size and contour. Accurate measurement and reproduction of lip color are essential to build strong cross-sectional knowledge about lip color.

OBJECTIVE

This preliminary experiment of a large-scale project on lip and skin color was designed to assess accuracy in lip color measurement and recommend instruments and protocols for good measurement practice.

METHODS

The study involved 19 healthy French Caucasian women. Their inferior and superior natural lip color was measured twice with three devices in order to extract the standard colorimetric parameters of lightness (L*), chroma (C*), and hue (h): the VISIA-CR® (high-resolution digital camera, Canfield Scientific Inc.); the spectrophotometer VS3200 (45°:0° spectrophotometer, MetaVue™ VS3200, X-Rite Inc.); and the SpectraFace® (new hyperspectral imaging system, Newtone Technologies). The intercomparison and color distribution between the different instruments and the measurement repeatability of each one were assessed.

RESULTS

Our results showed a reliable and equivalent repeatability for the three tested instruments. Moreover, the three tools led to the same conclusion regarding lip color heterogeneity (lighter, redder, less yellow and more saturated inferior lip versus superior lip). Agreement between the SpectraFace® and the spectrophotometer measurements was higher, and the SpectraFace® allowed to identify three separated lip color typologies.

CONCLUSION

In conclusion, the combination of imaging technology and hyperspectral measurement makes the SpectraFace® a useful tool to investigate lip color characterization and establish a large-scale cross-sectional knowledge study about lip color.

Shifts in Female Facial Attractiveness during Pregnancy

It has been proposed that women’s physical attractiveness is a cue to temporal changes in fertility. If this is the case, we should observe shifts in attractiveness during pregnancy—a unique physiological state of temporal infertility. The aim of this study was to examine how women’s facial attractiveness changes during the subsequent trimesters of pregnancy and how it compares to that of nonpregnant women. Sixty-six pictures of pregnant women (22 pictures per trimester) and 22 of nonpregnant women (a control group) were used to generate four composite portraits, which were subsequently assessed for facial attractiveness by 117 heterosexual men. The results show considerable differences between facial attractiveness ratings depending on the status and progress of pregnancy. Nonpregnant women were perceived as the most attractive, and the attractiveness scores of pregnant women decreased throughout the course of pregnancy. Our findings show that facial attractiveness can be influenced by pregnancy and that gestation, even at its early stages, affects facial attractiveness. Considerable changes in women’s physiology that occur during pregnancy may be responsible for the observed effects.