Research on Images of Hair up-styles and Wedding Dress Styles of Prospective Brides

This study is on the image evaluation of the hair up-style and the wedding dress styles of prospective brides. Based on some prior theoretical studies, and information obtained from wedding magazines and interviews conducted at the beauty business places, four kinds of the hair up-style were selected, namely, top-point, golden-point, back-point, and nape point. Three styles of necklines were selected: boat necklines, V-necklines, and off-shoulder necklines. The surveyor herself did the hair styling for models, and dressed up the models, to produce the stimuli. And the stimuli were presented to percipients along with questionnaires for measuring the image evaluations. Prepared were total 12 different kinds of stimuli, in which four hair up-styles and three dress styles were combined into 12 combinations (), and, with respect to these 12 stimuli, 26 itemized questions were included in the questionnaire. From the factor analysis on the image evaluation of the hair up- style and wedding dresses, five factors were derived as fallowing: attractiveness, boldness, purity, cuteness, feminity. This study revealed that wedding dress styles are more sensitive to the contemporary trend, compared to the hair styles; and the selection in the wedding style is quite influenced by the dress style, but not by the hair up-style. Also, prospective brides evaluated the hair up-styles and the wedding dress styles separately without recognizing their mutual relationship, and thus did not recognize the two as the mutually coordinated relationship, but rather recognize the two as two separate elements.