What does it mean to be beautiful? Development, measurement, and validation of a Personal Beauty Values Scale

Beauty is an abstract concept that reflects the context of the upbringing as well as cultural and social perceptions that individuals have internalized. What it means to be beautiful may have consequences for individual experience, consumption behavior, and well-being. After all, striving to be beautiful may lead to behavior that enables a person to reach this goal. However, a systematic scale to measure what beauty means for individuals has yet to be established. In the current study, we attempt to bridge this gap by developing, measuring, and validating a Personal Beauty Values Scale. A series of explorative studies yielded five distinct dimensions: cultural flawlessness, self-improvement, social appropriateness, inner beauty, and natural uniqueness, whose reliability, validity, and generalizability were confirmed with samples from the UK (n = 401 and n = 396), the U.S. (n = 1,039), Japan (n = 1,011), and Denmark (n = 981). The nomological validation using the U.S. sample further demonstrated the distinct characteristics of the five personal beauty values dimensions that differently affect appearance-conscious emotions such as shame, guilt, hubristic pride, and authentic pride. Notably, considering these five dimensions led to clarifying the psychological mechanism behind a specific consumer behavior, that is, the consideration of cosmetic surgery. For example, the feeling of shame played an important role in explaining the consideration of cosmetic surgery for individuals who prioritize cultural flawlessness, social appropriateness, and self-improvement. However, among these three dimensions, self-improvement had a negative effect on the consideration of cosmetic surgery.