Abstract
Human skin color is one of the most common colors which we see in everyday life. The skin color distribution of young Japanese women showed a trend that yellowish skin had higher lightness than reddish skin. Whereas, it was shown that reddish skin appeared brighter than yellowish skin when both had the same lightness (Yoshikawa et al., 2012). However, it is not clear how the brightness perception of facial skin is influenced by the diversity of skin colors and observers. Here, we investigate the brightness perception of facial skin for observers in different genders and countries. A young Japanese female face as an original face was used. In this study, we prepared test faces with four skin color types that were the average skin colors of Japanese, Thai, Caucasian, and African. A test image (with constant lightness and different hue angle) and a scale image (with the original hue of each skin color type varying lightness) were presented side by side on a color-calibrated tablet display and observers adjusted the brightness of facial skin of the scale image to match that of the test image. As a result, Japanese observers showed a trend that reddish skin appeared brighter than yellowish skin which was consistent with the previous study, but Thai and Chinese observers did not. We did not find a clear difference between male and female observers. Our results imply that there is the influence of ethnicities or environments on the brightness perception of facial skin.