The Chinese Ideal Facial Appearance Scale: Initial Development, Validation, Gender And Age Difference

Facial appearance played an important role in relationship, mate selection and work as an important part of body image. Researches in body image domain indicated that many Chinese adolescents dissatisfied with their facial appearance. The discrepancy between real and ideal facial appearance may lead to negative influence to mental health. As a result researching about ideal facial appearance can supply empirical support and guide the adolescents to build healthier ideal facial value, and enrich the research of body image.Researches abroad found there were three factors correlated with facial attractiveness which were sex dimorphism, symmetric and averageness. And the researches about body image found ideal body image was multidimensional. But there was no research about ideal facial appearance. So this study connected facial attractiveness and ideal body image and identified ideal facial appearance as the cognition and evaluation of the most attractive facial appearance who would like to own, which including facial features and hair. This study followed strict procedure as literature summary, open-ended questionnaire and initial dimension construction, then ideal facial appearance scale (IFAS) come out. Middle and senior school students and university students were investigated, and 718 valid scales for females' subscale (IFAS-F) and 684 valid one for males'(IFAS-M) were left. Half of them were used for exploratory factor analysis and the other half were used for confirm factor analysis. The final scale was composed by 18 items of IFAS-F and 12 items of IFAS-M. Then the reliability and validation were confirmed, so as gender and age difference.In summary, we can draw a conclusion as following:(1) The ideal facial appearance was multidimensional and there were four factors for females' facial appearance as global symmetric, modern fashion, traditional delicateness and constant feminine, while there were three for males as global symmetric, masculinity and androgyny. (2) This scale was good in psychometric indexes. (3) There were significant gender and age differences for adolescents' facial appearances.