We assessed empirical support for (1) the widely held notion that across so-called ‘honor, dignity, and face cultures’ internal and external components of self-esteem are differentially important for overall self-esteem, and (2) the idea that concerns for honor are related to internal and external components of self-esteem in honor cultures but not in dignity and face cultures. Most importantly, we also set out to (3) investigate whether measures are equivalent, that is, whether a comparison of means and relationships across cultural groups is possible with the employed scales. Data were collected in six countries (N = 1099). We obtained only metric invariance for the self-esteem and honor scales, allowing for comparisons of relationships across samples, but not scale means. Partly confirming theoretical ideas on the importance of internal and external components of self-esteem, we found that only external rather than both external and internal self-esteem was relatively more important for overall self-esteem in ‘honor cultures’, in a ‘dignity’ culture internal self-esteem was relatively more important than external self-esteem. Contrary to expectations, in a ‘face’ culture internal self-esteem was relatively more important than external self-esteem. We were not able to conceptually replicate earlier reported relationships between components of self-esteem and the concern for honor, as we observed no cultural differences in the relationship between self-esteem and honor. We point towards the need for future studies to consider invariance testing in the field of honor to appropriately understand differences and similarities between samples.