Background: As the number of aesthetic treatments has grown, so have the number of photonumeric assessment scales used to compare the effectiveness of these aesthetic treatments in specific anatomical areas; however, these are primarily based on Caucasian features.
Objective: To assess the validity of the first aesthetic scale for assessing the slope of the Asian forehead. A secondary objective was to correlate this scale with subject demographics and baseline characteristics.
Methods: During 2 validation sessions, 13 raters assessed full frontal and lateral facial images of female (n = 28; 56.0%) and male (n = 22; 44%) subjects. For each subject, the severity of forehead sloping was graded from 0 (convex forehead, optimal forehead volume) to 4 (concave forehead, very severe sloping). Raters also assessed the age of each subject and the estimated aesthetic treatment effort required to treat each subject.
Results: Inter-rater reliability was "substantial" with scores of 0.67 and 0.68 for the first and second validation sessions, indicating high reliability. BMI showed the highest correlation with the scale and was a significant predictor in the final regression model.
Conclusion: This photonumeric assessment scale will be useful for assessing the slope of the Asian forehead in both clinical and research settings.