I would like to thank Drs Guo and Bai for their interest in our article. Their comments were pertinent. I want to explain something that was not clear in our manuscript. Initially, the miniatures of all the images were mounted on a page, starting with the image of the smallest black space and progressing toward the largest black space. On another page, the same images were mounted, but this time starting with the largest black space and progressing to the smallest black space. These 2 initial pages served only to verify whether the evaluators knew how to distinguish 1 image from the other. They were not used by the evaluators to attribute their scores.

When the images were used by the evaluators to create their scores, they were indeed placed in randomized order. This was a lapse on our part not to have pointed this out in the “Material and methods” section.

I agree with Drs Guo and Bai regarding the respect that we must have for a patient’s desires. Quite often, something that could be considered unesthetic by orthodontists might not seem unattractive to the patient. Once again, we thank you for your interest in our article.