Car Facial Image Perference Research Among Chinese Young Consumers

This paper focuses on answering the question: What is a beautiful car for those who don’tunderstand car styling? The paper chooses CAR FACE to breakthrough and finally provedthat people understand car face styling in the way they understand human face. Even aconsumer not know car world at all can tell the gender tendency, emotional expression,informative character and even roles of a car face. Some human face aesthetic rules andpreferences proved to be valid in car face context while some don’t.Main approach of the research is a kansei engineering experiment. The experiment chose13car facial images as samples and applied a23-point PDM model into them to get the keypoints’ positions and critical measurements. Then140participants were invited to givefeedbacks on samples’ gender tendency, hypothetical age, rich man/poor man conjecture,emotional expression, informative character and roles. Then correlational analyses wereconducted between these feedbacks and the samples’ popularity to obtain a kansei preferenceof a car face. They can also be related to measurements of the sample to get know how theseperceptual impacts are made by the facial images. The calculations show that…In sexual aspect, gender information are all around car face and among all eyebrow,the line in the hood, deliver most. Neutral male face ischosen as the favorite.In uniqueness aspect, unlike human faces, average car faces lead to absolute negativefeedbacks.In emotion aspect, people like happy faces with positive emotions and dislike sadfaces or faces with no expression. The eye-eyebrow area forms the emotions on facewhile the lower part intensifies or weakens the expression.In personality aspect, there are2obvious preferences. One is a dignified and reliableface representing the traditional aesthetic with a neutral emotion or even a tinge ofsadness and the other is a outgoing and cheerful face representing the new, and theyounger aesthetic, which carries a extremely happy expression.In character aspect, boys loves “bro”faces with an expression of pure joy while girlswant the car face looks like family members, amiable and peaceful, which shows howdifferently boys and girls think of car and how diverse their preferences will be.To sum up,3types of aesthetic preferences surfaced during the research: JOY, whichexpresses positive emotions and brings feeling of friends; STEADINESS, whose steady shapebrings reliability like family; and FIERCENESS with maximum of anger, dynamism andvisual impact.These expressions are generated in following parts of the face: Layoutarrangement,determining type of the expression; eyes and eyebrows, determining the emotion andsilhouette of the facial lower part, effecting personality of the face.