If you were asked which physical criteria of a girl that may help her to be a JKT48 member, Indonesian and Japanese should have some shared desirable physical criteria. However, beauty is in the eye of the beholder. Different people have different ideas about what is beautiful or what is attractive. It entices me to find out, how international people, especially westerners, rate the attractiveness of our lovely JKT48 members. This is something that never been tested before, so it must be very interesting to know their opinion.

We probed the opinion through a survey. The survey finished at March 25, 2015. This survey is also a part of research project titled First Impressions of Facial Expressions: Case Study JKT48 General Elections by Wilma Latuny, a PhD student from Tilburg University, Netherlands. In this project, I am contributing as second author. The goal of this research project is finding out to what extent facial expressions of JKT48 members can predict their rank on sousenkyo in the context of first impressions and attractiveness.

In the survey, we asked participants to rate the attractiveness of sixteen JKT48 members from Sousenkyo 2014. We provided a picture (from photopack) of each member as visual aid for participants to rate the attractiveness. The scale of attractiveness ranged from 0 to 100. Each score that assigned by participants fits into seven attractiveness levels: very unattractive, moderately unattractive, mildly unattractive, neutral, mildly attractive, moderately attractive and very attractive.

Why only last year senbatsu sousenkyo members? Why not all JKT48 members? The most obvious reason is because sousenkyo provides us the numerical vote data of the members to build members’ ranking. This survey is baseline result to rate attractiveness based on first impressions. The result of this survey will be compared to analysis of members’ facial expression from video campaign. We analyze the facial expression by a software called CERT (Computer Expression Recognition Toolbox).

Without a further ado, this is the most interesting part: the result.

Demographic of Participants

The total participants of this survey were 40 people, consisted of 60% male participants and 40% female participants. The current education levels of our participants were 55% bachelor degree, followed by 43% master degree and 3% high school. The minimum age of our participants was 18 years old and the maximum age of our participants was 33 years old. The average of participants’ age was 24.48 years old.

Dutch dominated the nationality of participants. Other nationalities were there too. We attempted as much as we can to avoid Asian participants, especially Indonesian. Although those Indonesian are not JKT48 fans, we thought that Indonesian beauty standard might affect the result. However at the end, three Indonesian, four Chinese and one participant from Hong Kong filled in the survey.

The participants’ nationalities are displayed on following chart below.

And the most attractive JKT48 Members based on the survey…

As we can see from the above graph, Melody is the most attractive JKT48 member according to westerners, followed by Ve. It was very identical with the actual result of last year sousenkyo. However, I think it is very naïve to conclude that Melody and Ve are universally attractive. Some factors might influence why participants rated them as the most attractive.

Melody became the most attractive JKT48 member based on rating of the international people is quite surprising. Before the survey was conducted, personally I guessed Nabilah, Ayana or Shania would appear on top ranks, after (of course) Rica.

After filled in the survey, we had a small talk with the participants to discuss about how the survey went. Some participants said the members are too child-like and cute face type, so they assigned the moderate score for the attractiveness. I remember a comment from a Dutch girl,

Well, the girls are cutie type, not the type of drop dead gorgeous Asian women. If I can take the example of the drop dead gorgeous Asian women are Fan Bing Bing and Bhutan queen.

Some Interesting Comments: What Made Them Attractive?

In the last part of the survey, we asked the optional question to participants about why they think that some members are attractive and others are not. Here we selected some interesting comments.

“Someone is really young I think, I prefer more mature girls. The eyes are important, some girl look more confident when I looked at these eyes, I think these girls are more attractive”

“Cute and looks like a cat is the most reason I think she is attractive.”

“The least attractive girls were girls who looked like they were 13/14 years old. My rate in that case was neutral, meaning that objectively speaking they were not ugly but I did not find them attractive. The most attractive girls were girls who looked older.”

“Some girls are more attractive because they have cute smile and elegant facial features.”

“With or without mature charm.”

“Facial expressions, general observation of the picture itself. Attitude is most important”

“Because some look more Chinese. If her face is more symmetric then it’s more attractive. Faces you can relate to get higher scores.”