Subjective vs objective evaluations of smile esthetics

Dimensional analyses of frontal posed smile attractiveness in Japanese female patients

“…The results in the present study for Height-5, also often referred to as lower lip to incisor 7,8,13 or maxillary incisal edge to lower lip, 17 support Schabel et al, 7 who reported that the least attractive smiles had a significantly greater distance from the lower lip to the incisor, a finding that also contradicts the findings of McNamara et al, 13 who reported that a greater distance between the lower lip and the incisor resulted in a more attractive smile for orthodontists, although there is known to be strong agreement between orthodontists and laypersons in their subjective evaluations of smile esthetics.…”

“…13,[26][27][28] In the present study, a significantly smaller Height-1, also known as interlabial gap 7,8,13,15,17 or smile height, 18 was observed in group A, which had attractive frontal smiles compared with group B. Schabel et al 7 evaluated the Height-1 of smile photographs in the United States, and found an insignificant difference between the most attractive and least attractive frontal posed smiles. In their study, 7 similar results were also found for Height-4, also frequently referred to as maximum incisor exposure, 7,8 and for incisor exposure, 13 upper lip to incisal edge, 14 and maxillary incisal display. 17 These differing results suggest that it is important to consider the ethnic and cultural background of both patients and evaluators when analyzing the smiles of orthodontic patients.…”

“…Janson 6 recently reviewed previous articles on this matter and concluded that images of actual patients are more acceptable SMILE ATTRACTIONS than digitally altered smiles. Therefore, we utilized nonmanipulated photographs of Japanese orthodontic patients to analyze smiles and found no significant difference between groups A and B for Width-4 (right buccal corridor 7,8,13,16 ), Width-5 (left buccal corridor 7,8,13,16 ), Width-6 (right posterior corridor 13 ), and Width-7 (left posterior corridor 13 ) evaluated by the dental students. This finding suggests that the buccal corridor is not correlated with human judgments of smile attractiveness in Japanese orthodontic patients when nonmanipulated images are used, and supports the results of previous studies.…”

“…Transverse dimensional items 7,8,13,[15][16][17][18] and vertical dimensional items 7,8,[13][14][15][16][17][18] have been proposed for analyzing the attractiveness of frontal posed smiles, and these items have been reported to affect the smile attractiveness of orthodontic patients. However, in the present study, significant differences between the groups were found only in the items related to the vertical dimension, not the transverse dimension.…”

“…Width-3 Smile width 7,8,18 Intercommissural width 15 Intercommissural distance 16 Outer intercommissural width …”