The effect of brightness and lightness on the evaluation of facial skin tone

Abstract

　Facial skin tone plays an important role in detecting health signals or attractiveness. One of ideal and attractive state of facial skin tone in east Asian countries, “Bihaku,” has been purported as being due to high brightness or high lightness, although brightness is a distinct concept from lightness. In Experiment 1, we examined which perception of brightness or lightness is correlated with “Bihaku” by independently manipulating metric lightness, which causes brightness, and the distance from a white point, which affects a similarity to lightness. We found that lightness showed a good fit to “Bihaku.” In Experiment 2, points of subjective equality were measured using the constant method, and we compared the predictability of the distance from the white point with various factors shown in previous studies. The fact that “Bihaku” of the facial skin tone was predicted well based on the distance from the white point with the highest accuracy suggests that the superiority of lightness explains the perception of “Bihaku” rather than metric lightness, hue, or saturation.