Young Japanese women’s views on the skin colour of each gender : analyzing the wording used for lightness and hue

Abstract

　Earlier studies (Yamada, 2010, 2015) have reported the differences between mental images and the actual appearances of skin colour. According to that research, young Japanese female students tended to choose more yellowish colour patches as representative of men’s skin rather than women’s skin, even though, in actuality, young Japanese men’s skin is redder in tint than that of young Japanese women (Yamada, 2010). In the present study, we aimed to further extract respondents’ views on the skin colour of each gender and of their own bodies.

　Our study consisted of 82 young Japanese female students. The results showed a difference in assessing the lightness of skin between the two genders. In contrast, the wording used to describe the hue was highly ambiguous. The young women assessed skin colour as fairer than the imagined average among both females and males, even though the traditional Japanese view holds that fair skin belonged exclusively to females. A cluster analysis done by us identified some patterns in the students’ word choices for skin colour.