• Paiboon Techalertpaisarn
• Somsak Chengprapakorn
• Sarilthorn Pongvarapa
• Anyanee Sanghirunsook

Objective The purposes of this study were 1) to verify the reliability of the esthetic scores of the profile of the lateral facial silhouettes and photographs evaluated by a panel of judges 2) to study the correlation between esthetic scores of facial silhouettes and photographs and 3) to compare the esthetic scores among groups with various degrees of facial convexity.

Materials and methods Thirty-one facial photographs on the lateral view were taken from adult Thai female participants, who were 20 to 24 years old and had various degrees of facial convexity. All pictures were scanned and saved into JPEG format. Silhouettes were made from the photographs by means of the Photoshop program version 7.0 Both silhouettes and photographs were randomly arranged and were addressed subjectively via numeric scale 0 to 10 (0.5 interval) by the 3^rd year dental students (17 males and 27 females: age 19 - 20 years). The second assessment was performed 1 month later. The facial convexity angles were measured from the facial photographs and the participants were classified into 3 groups: Group 1 (n = 9, -6.3 to 1.1 degree), Group 2 (n = 13, 3.0 to 8.8 degree) and Group 3 (n = 9, 9.1 to 24.4 degree).

Results The method error of silhouettes and photographs were 0.36 and 0.35. The first and second silhouette esthetic scores were not significantly different (p = 0.94) while the first and second lateral photograph esthetic scores were significantly different (p = 0.01). The first and second correlation coefficients between the esthetic score from the silhouettes and photographs were 0.66 and 0.73, respectively. Among 3 groups, Group 2 got the highest score, whereas, Group 1 got the lowest score in both silhouettes and photographs. In the first judgement, the esthetic scores (silhouettes’ mean ± SD, photographs’ mean ± SD) of Group 2 (5.0 ± 0.9, 5.0 ± 0.4) and Group 3 (4.7 ± 1.2 and 4.7 ± 0.9) were significantly higher than those of Group 1 (3.5 ± 0.8 and 3.8 ± 0.8).

Conclusion The assessment method by the panel of judges was reproducible in acceptable level. Group 2 that had average facial convexity tended to get the highest esthetic score. However, the esthetic score obtained from the panel of judges should be used carefully with understanding of its method error.

(CU Dent J. 2006;29:127-138)