The shaping effect of body shapers on female attractiveness

Abstract

Body attractiveness is the perception of the physical traits of an individual human body, as attractive or beautiful. The variety of judgment was believed to be dependent on different culture/society and time period. Recent empirical results have provided evidence that body attractiveness of subjects with wearing standardized clothes during the tests were determined by a number of body ratios, such as Golden proportion, Wacoal golden indices, Body Mass Index (BMI), Waist-To-Hip Ratio (WHR), Volume Height Index (VHI). To increase body attractiveness, body shaper becomes a kind of hot undergarments which are believed to be able to beautify body contour shape by given shape-up effect. However, researches to date has not fully explored how effective the body ratios or other parameters are to explain the change of body shape by wearing body shaper. Therefore, this study aims to investigate what parameters can effectively indicate body attractiveness on apparent variation in consideration of the effect of wearing body shapers. In this study, 18 Hong Kong young women with normal weight (BMI range from 18.5 to 24.9kg/m2) were selected from 80 women. 15 styles of bras and 8 styles of girdles with four leading brands were chosen from the local market. 40 professional undergarment consultants with average 5 years working experience were invited to be judgers in this project. Based on the Pair-t Test results, the women subject images with wearing body shaper have rated significantly higher than the nude subject images. For the correlation analysis, it was found that explanatory power of body ratios on change of body attractiveness after wearing different body shapers was limited. Therefore, other body parameters relating body contours were considered as variables which may determine body attractiveness perception tested by Multiple Regression equations development. Under the review of scatter plots, judges considered two different groups of parameters when judges determined women subject images were below 5.5 attractiveness ratings or women subject images were between 5.5 and 9 attractiveness ratings. Meanwhile, based on the attributes of Multiple Regression equations, the negative slope of each body parameters included in the equations indicated that judges tend to perceive subject images with giving a 'base' score and then deducting certain score due to unattractive level of each of body parameters which included in the Multiple Regression equations. According to the above statistical analysis result, obviously, breast and hip proportions are two key parameters to determine the whole body attractiveness, One-Way ANOVA showed that breast and hip contour attractiveness were two major contour segments that influence whole body attractiveness ratings. The high coefficient of determination obtaining from the Multiple Regression equation showed that breast contour attractiveness and hip contour attractiveness explained majority of whole body attractiveness. It also revealed that breast contour attractiveness and hip contour attractiveness contributed almost even significance on prediction of whole body attractiveness respectively. The research results established clear picture of judges' perception and judgment attributes on whole body attractiveness. It contributed knowledge for assessment the shape-up effect of body shapers on improvement of the whole body attractiveness.