Development and Initial Validation of a Novel Professional Aesthetic Scale for the Female Abdomen

A growing body of literature describes abdominal aesthetic goals to tailor surgical and nonsurgical treatment options to meet patient goals. The authors aimed to integrate layperson perceptions into the design of a novel professional aesthetic scale for the abdomen.

An iterative process of expert consensus was used to choose five domains: abdominal muscle lines, abdominal shape, scar, skin, and umbilicus. A survey was developed to measure global and domain-specific aesthetic preferences on five abdomens. This was distributed through Amazon Mechanical Turk to 340 respondents. Principal component analysis was used to integrate survey data into weights for each of the scale's subquestions. Attending plastic surgeons then rated abdomens using the final scale, and reliability and validity were calculated.

The final scale included 11 subquestions-hourglass shape, bulges, hernia, infraumbilical skin, supraumbilical skin, umbilicus shape, umbilicus medialization position, umbilicus height position, semilunar lines, central midline depression, and scar-within the five domains. Central midline depression held the highest weight (16.1 percent) when correlated with global aesthetic rating, followed by semilunar lines (15.8 percent) and infraumbilical skin (11.8 percent). The final scale demonstrated strong validity (Pearson r = 0.99) and was rated as easy to use by seven attending plastic surgeons.

The final scale is the first published professional aesthetic scale for the abdomen that aims to integrate layperson opinion. This analysis and survey data provide insights into the importance of 11 components in overall aesthetic appeal of the abdomen.