The 4 Big Myths of Profile Pictures

January 20th, 2010 by Christian

Hello, old friends. I am back from dark months of data mining, here now to present my ores. To write this piece, we cataloged over 7,000 photographs on OkCupid.com, analyzing three primary things:

  • Facial Attitude. Is the person smiling? Staring straight ahead? Doing that flirty lip-pursing thing?
  • Photo Context. Is there alcohol? Is there a pet? Is the photo outdoors? Is it in a bedroom?
  • Skin. How much skin is the person showing? How much face? How much breasts? How much ripped abs?

In looking closely at the astonishingly wide variety of ways our users have chosen to represent themselves, we discovered much of the collective wisdom about profile pictures was wrong. For interested readers, I explain our measurement process, and how we collected our data, at the end of the post. All my bar charts are zeroed on the average picture. Now to the data.

MYTH 1
It’s better to smile

One of the first things we noticed when diving into our pool of photos is that men and women have very different approaches to the camera.

Women smile almost twice as often as men do and make that flirty-face four times as often.

Now, you’re always told to look happy and make eye contact in social situations, but at least for your online dating photo, that’s just not optimal advice. For women, a smile isn’t strictly better: she actually gets the most messages by flirting directly into the camera, like the center and right-hand subjects above.

Notice that, however, that flirting away from the camera is the single worst attitude a woman can take. Certain social etiquettes apply even online: if you’re going to be making eyes at someone, it should be with the person looking at your picture.

Men’s photos are most effective when they look away from the camera and don’t smile:

Maybe women want a little mystery. What is he looking at? Slashdot? Or Engadget?

It’s interesting that while making flirty eye contact is relatively okay for men, flirting away from the camera is the worst thing they, too, can do.

MYTH 2
You shouldn’t take your picture with your phone or webcam

The rationale behind this myth seems solid: cell-phones and webcams take low-end photos; when the camera’s fixed on your desktop or at the end of your arm, the context of the photo is bound to be pretty mundane; and there’s the avoidable creepiness of someone lurking in the dark, in front of the computer, snapping his own button.

So we were very surprised to discover that for both genders, self-shot pictures are more successful than average:

Granted, the benefit of a self-shot photo is small (I’m not exactly sure what a guy’s supposed to do with that extra tenth of a girl he talks to), but given our expectations and the prevalence of advice against taking your own picture for a dating profile, we thought this result was noteworthy. Perhaps what these photos lack in technological quality they make up for in intimacy, and it’s undeniable that at their best, self-shot pics can have an approachable, casual vibe that makes you feel already close to the subject.

This finding led us to investigate a controversial women-only subset of the self-shot picture: the universally maligned “MySpace Shot,” taken by holding your camera above your head and being just so darn coy.

We were sure that everyone thought these pictures were kinda lame. In fact, the prospect of producing hard data on just how lame got us all excited. But we were so wrong.

In terms of getting new messages, the MySpace Shot is the single most effective photo type for women. We at first thought this was just because, typically, you can kind of see down the girl’s shirt with the camera at that angle—indeed, that seems to be the point of shot in the first place—so we excluded all cleavage-showing shots from the pool and ran the numbers again. No change: it’s still the best shot; better, in fact, than straight-up boob pics (more on those later).

At least from the perspective of online-dating, and perhaps social media in general, the MySpace Shot might be the best way for a woman to take a picture.

MYTH 3
Guys should keep their shirts on

The male “Ab Shot” has the same reputation as the MySpace Shot—it’s an Internet cliché that supposedly everyone thinks is only for bozos. To wit: a journalist was visiting our office recently, and when we told her we were researching user photos, the first thing she said was “please tell me people hate it when guys show off their abs.” We hadn’t finished running the numbers yet, so we confidently reassured her that people did. The data contradicted us.

Of course, there is some self-selection here: the guys showing off their abs are the ones with abs worth showing, and naturally the best bodies get lots of messages. So we can’t recommend this photo tactic to every man. But, contrary to everything you read about profile pictures, if you’re a guy with a nice body, it’s actually better to take off your shirt than to leave it on. We would never suggest to a Fitzgerald or a Dave Eggers to limit his profile to 100 words, and so why should guys with great bodies keep their best asset under wraps?

Dating, both online and off is about playing to your strengths, and it should be no different for men with muscles, even if the classic pose is kinda hard to take:

After weeks of sorting through pictures, I started calling these guys headless horsemen.

An interesting caveat here is that a six-pack does seem to have a short shelf life: the effectiveness of the “abs pic” decreases sharply with age.

A 19 year-old showing his abs meets just under 1.4 women for every women he reaches out to, meaning that not only are females responding to his messages, but many are actually contacting him first. For a 31 year-old ab shower, that ratio has regressed to much closer to the average.

Because of our restricted data set for this post, we can only make confident claims for 19 to 31 year-olds right now, but it’s our strong suspicion that this downward trend continues with age. In the future perhaps we can investigate what’s behind the decline: is it because older guys and their older abs are inherently less attractive, or because women as they age find body shots less interesting?

One final point, vis à vis men, their torsos, and the clothing thereupon: if you’re not the type of guy who can show off your muscles, don’t veer off in the opposite direction and get all dressed up. Outfits more sophisticated than a simple collared shirt fare poorly:

The Cleavage Shot

There are no clear myths associated with showing cleavage in your picture. Most “experts” recommend you don’t, but everyone knows that breasts get attention, so to treat that recommendation as a “myth” would be disingenuous. But since the Cleavage Shot is the feminine analogue of the Ab Shot, and an undisputed online dating archetype, we thought we should discuss it.

Like the Ab Shot, the Cleavage Shot is very successful, drawing 12.9 new contacts per month, or 49% more than average. But unlike the Abs Shot, this positive effect actually trends against the effects of age.

As you would expect, women get fewer and fewer new messages as they age (which is a topic for another whole post!), but this decrease in new contacts is substantially slower for women with cleavage pics. A 32 year-old woman showing her body gets only 1 less message a month than the equivalent 18 year-old; an older woman not showing off gets 4 messages less, a large relative fall-off in popularity. The older the woman, the more relatively successful she is showing off her body

We find this anti-aging trend surprising. When we look further into the data, we can see that as women get older, they are more hesitant to emphasize their bodies, despite its still being a good strategy (at least in terms of message volume). Instead, they increasingly choose to show themselves in non-sexual contexts, like being outdoors:

For women in their late teens and early twenties, body pictures are the most popular type of shot; outdoor pictures are second. This ordering is reversed by the mid-twenties.

To wrap up our cleavage discussion, let’s assess the kind of messages the cleavage-showers are getting. A message like “Hey nice rack” isn’t really gonna lead anywhere, and isn’t very valuable to the recipient. We looked a level deeper and analyzed what resulted from the incoming contacts. Did the messages go unanswered? Did they turn into legitimate conversations? We didn’t go through anyone’s inbox to do this; we mathematically modeled a “conversation,” based number of messages back and forth. And we discovered the following:

This chart gives excellent insight as to why to the subject of this picture:

gets many more meaningful messages than does the subject of this one:

even though the two women are basically the same age, spend the same amount of time on the site, have similar profile length and quality, and have the same “attractiveness” as rated by OkCupid’s male population. If you want worthwhile messages in your inbox, the value of being conversation-worthy, as opposed to merely sexy, cannot be overstated.

MYTH 4
Make sure your face is showing

We used to think that the one iron-clad rule of Internet dating photos was to at least show your face. In fact, we used to give this very advice on OkCupid’s own photo upload page:

That page reads differently now because we found that all other things being equal whether you show your face really doesn’t affect your messages at all.

When at first these results came back, we didn’t believe it. We installed all kinds of sophisticated photo analysis software libraries, ran scripts to measure the percentage of face in each of our photos, generated diabolically meaningless scatter plots:

But the facts were stubborn: your face doesn’t necessarily matter. In fact, not showing your face can in fact be a positive, as long as you substitute in something unusual, sexy, or mysterious enough to make people want to talk to you.

All of the above subjects get far more messages than average, and yet none of them have outstanding profiles. The pictures do all the work: in different ways, they pique the viewer’s curiosity and say a lot about who the subject is (or wants to be).

Of course, we wouldn’t recommend that you meet someone in person without first seeing a full photo of them, that still seems like a recipe for disaster. In the near future, we’re going to be arranging series of blind dates through the site, and profile photo accuracy vs. the success of the date will be a big part of the report. Thanks for reading.

How we collected and evaluated this data

Our data set was chosen at random from all users in big cities, with only one profile photograph, between the ages of 18 and 32. We then lopped the most and least attractive members of the pool, fearing that they would skew our results. So all the data in this post is for “average-looking people;” here’s a graphical representation of that concept for the female pool.

After a bit more sifting, we finalized our data pool at 7,140 users. Aside from running each picture through a variety of analysis scripts, we tagged, by hand, each picture for various contextual indicators. We double-checked the tags before generating our data.

To quantify “profile success” for women, we used new messages received per active month on the site.

We had to do something different than this for guys, because of the fundamentally different role they play in the online courtship process: they are the ones reaching out to new people; women send only a small fraction of the unsolicited “hellos” that men do. As you’ve seen, the metric we settled on is, “women met per attempt”, which is:

(new incoming messages + replies to outgoing first contacts)
/
outgoing first contacts

Basically, this is how many women a guy has a conversation with, per new woman he reaches out to, and we feel it’s the best way to measure his success per unit time on OkCupid. Note that if a guy has a particularly compelling photo, this ratio could exceed 1, as he’d be getting messages from the women who come across his profile, as well as the women he himself is reaching out to.

. . .

We do a lot of math on OkCupid—most of it to help people get dates. The site is totally free. If you're single, you should check us out.

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185 Responses to “The 4 Big Myths of Profile Pictures”

  1. Kudos for the research skills!

  2. covered face

    I’m not entirely surprised by the covered face. I used OKCupid (anarchdork) with a shot of an upside-book covering my face and it intrigued a girl enough to contact me. She and I have now lived together for a couple of years and I’m at the point where I’m saving up for a ring.

  3. Peter

    Why ladder theory is crap.

    You forced my hand and I had to read that awful ladder theory website again. There are several reasons why ladder theory is wrong :

    1) The assumptions of what men and women think about – their ideas and proportions are wrong for both men and women

    2) The pathetic concentration on ‘biker dudes’

    3) The whole concept of one and two ladders.

    4) The concentration on sex

    The first item needs no further explanation. The two ladder theory can clearly be seen to be shit by the admission that men can ‘jump’ between ladders. Neither is it true that men only have one ladder – think of the women you know. Select a woman you know who is hot, sexy and absolutely batshit crazy – yes, the one that’s stalked three other people you know of, had several birth protection accidents and got into fights. Possibly worth it as a friend from a safe distance, definitely not ever worth it for sex.

    So far as ‘biker dudes’ go, it’s really a shortcut saying that many women like men who are exciting, different and dominant. If you want to be just as bitter as the ladder theory about it, many women want someone to make their life different without actually working at it. They want a man who can dominate them in bed, and someone who is different from average.

    Whilst many of those women should frankly Grow A Fucking Spine (that’s what they expect from men : why should they be exempt? A pair of tits does not provide you special privileges), it must be realised that those qualities are not exclusive to biker dudes.

    So – stand out, be different, play the sexual dominance game, be an interesting person and sell the idea you’ll make their life better/different with no effort on their behalf. If you do that, looks will be radically less important.

    It’s also well worth remembering that the defining characteristic of relationships is not sex. It may be one of the initial and ongoing pillars of it, but concentrating on sex to the exclusion of friendship is a huge mistake. If you’re completely dropping someone as a friend if they won’t have sex with you, it would never have worked as a relationship in the first place.

    If all you’re looking for is a fling, or a friend with benefits that isn’t really a proper developing friendship then fair enough, but do realise that is the case.

    Finally bear in mind that playing stereotypes is dangerous. Most women are sexually submissive, less independent than men and subject to a princess complex because of the way society treats women and supply and demand in the dating market. It doesn’t apply to all women though; we’re all individuals.

  4. lakrids

    quote Peter “we’re all individuals”
    Talk for you self. I am not.

  5. Is there any particular reason you left out the confidence intervals? The reader might not be confident in the result of your data mining without the statistical significance to back it up.

    Great analysis. I hope you’ll include some confidence intervals.

    Cheers!

  6. Ralph

    I thin kthe reason that the girl in the photo towards the beginning had more responses had more to do with the shuttle-cock behind her ear.

  7. Marco

    Wow, compliments for the superb work!

  8. kate

    interesting, but really heteronormative. also, why were myspace shots only discussed regarding women? i’ve seen plenty of guys do it. and the point is not to look down the shirt. taking a picture from above means you have to look up, which makes your face (and you generally) look thinner.

  9. Dan

    So get out there and take a camera-phone picture of yourself with no shirt, surfing with a dog, in an exotic location, with one of your friends in the background giving you a thumbs up.

  10. Eric

    Yes, please provide some measure of statistical significance. For all we know, your results are meaningless.

  11. Vulpus

    I found it interesting, though it wasn’t discussed, that posing with an Animal is the number 1 photo context for men but the worst for women. I suppose for men it might show women that they are caring or fun or nurturing or outdoorsy maybe, but why does it count against women?

  12. james

    this is the coolest report. ever. i totally want your job.

    question on methodology: for the females, “new messages received” as an indicator of profile success–is that strictly number of messages she received, or messages received from new suitors?

  13. Really interesting, keep up the good work!

  14. perry

    Would funny pictures fall under “doing something interesting”? I’ve always wondered about the impact of pictures I’ve chosen that put me in a fun, comedic light instead of a sexual one (photobombs, goofy expressions, etc- with supplementary “normal” pictures, of course). I’ve found that in dating situations men are thrilled by the fact that I have a sense of humor, but as this article showed, things come across very differently online.

  15. I pretty much have all the “do not do this in your pic” profile photos in mine account. Whoops. At least My 65yro Mother didn’t Photo Bomb my profile pic though…. http://hownottodateonline.com/post/347765915/the-profile-pic-bomb-your-65-year-old-mom-edition

  16. Thom

    I really appreciate all the effort you guys put into these posts and analyses. Fascinating stuff!

  17. rchoetzlein

    I’m glad that you focus on straight data analysis, as a start, but considering mechanisms seems like a really important discussion. For example, the reason women may “emphasize their bodies less, despite it being a good strategy” may be because the goals for older women dating are no longer purely sexual, and your analysis assumes that message count is all that matters – ie. you assume that the goals in the strategy are the same. Also, its unfortunate that every single photo example you show is of an attractive/flirty person, so there is some clear bias going on here. What about investigating all the myths associated with unattractive people?.. Interesting start, but i think all this is worth much more rigorous study. This reads more like popular science to me.

    PS. I just left 18 to 32 range of your data myself, so fortunately none of this applies to me : )

  18. Alan

    Does the chart titled “Chance a Message Leads to an Actual Conversation” refer only to women’s photos? (From the context, it looks like that is the case.) Is there a similar chart for men?

  19. Hey guys! Quick shout-out, I really love your blog! Some of the best info analysis out there, and a very unexplored field. Keep up the good work.

  20. Interesting. But what about the queers? I would love to see how all of this plays out for the women looking for women and the men looking for men on your site.

  21. Hot guy in photo 3

    Actually, this was very well done statistical analysis. I commend the people that had to go through the eye-bleeding horror of wading through this sort of stuff.

    I honestly believe that attraction has something to do with that “something”; if you want abs you can find them, if you want rack you do, too.. however there is a certain, more prevalent overlap in the venn diagram that just wants something interesting and exciting in their lives. That’s what makes things happen.

  22. LOVE this post. Really interesting, really entertaining. A theory on the success of the female “myspace shot”… to quote a youtube video, “She’s got ‘The Angles’” (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rBOfD2JBv0w).

    In other words, and not to be unfairly generalizing here, but extreme angled shots seem universally flattering, especially for females. It foreshortens the body creating a thinning illusion. The higher (or lower) the angle is from level, the more the body appears, well, errr… svelte.

    I tread carefully when I suggest thinner girls will most likely receive more attention in the photo-first world of online dating.

  23. My profile pictures defy all statistical analysis.

  24. joe blow

    I for one feel that top down MySpace shots are amateurish and unprofessional, and to me it indicates a lack of education. I would definitely not message anyone with that as their main photo.

    Good research though.

  25. Dan

    I’m curious about your analysis. You said that as people aged, they changed their proclivity for the types of photos they were posting. So I wonder if you did your cross analysis by age bracket, would you get the same results? What is the average age of the user of this site? Is age skewing the results at all? Is their a correlation between the age of the two people interacting? (ie if 80% of hte site is under 30, and 20% is over 30, and most of the people over 30 post travel pics while most of the people under 30 don’t, would that be the cause of why there are so fewer respones to travel photos? Either way, fun read!

  26. atomicturtle

    I’m a little disappointed that the math gurus and chart-makers of OKC didn’t include a factoring in of “pictures which involve the user giving alcohol to infants.” I get a LOT of emails based solely on that.

  27. Shannon W

    @Simon: Go to a mall on a Saturday, and look around at the people who are couples or pushing strollers. There aren’t a lot who are hot; in fact some of them are downright homely. Looks don’t prevent or guarantee your getting laid, finding a partner, settling down, etc. Otherwise the human population would be a hell of a lot smaller.

    This research doesn’t determine any individual’s success rate, just how to make it better.

  28. goocy

    Love your analyses, guys!
    And, as a psychologist myself, I envy your data pool.
    Glad to see you’re making something brilliant out of it!

    (But I also opt for confidence intervals.)

  29. Jay

    Hi guys – excellent post and analysis. Have you considered analyzing the above patterns in relation to the age of the intended contact? ie, your data show that young men who show off their abs have a contact rate greater than 1. Are they contacting/being contacted by women who are significantly older or around the same age? Similarly, the 32-yr old abs shotters – are they contacting women in their age range (+/- 1-2 yrs), or are they contacting women older/younger?

    Also, I’ve taken the liberty of copying some of your charts for my own blog and writing some words about it. I’ve provided full attribution and links back to your blog/site but if this is a problem, please let me know and I’ll delete the post.

  30. I’d really like to see a follow-up to this study. This is the type of thing that changes people’s behaviour.

    See how the percentage of cleavage or abs shots goes up among your study group in the next month or so.

  31. Geordie

    Without a comparison of single photo to multi-photo profiles this data is interesting but incomplete. As far as I can tell single photo profiles are in the distinct minority. I have examples of several of those categories of photos in my profile. Then again I am 10 years outside the age range in the sample as well and the trends I see in the data as well as my own experience imply that significantly influences the data.

  32. Sharon

    Very interesting post seems as tho Tom and all of you put much time and research into this. I am impressed.

  33. OkC you’re amazing! I read the post “Your Race Affects Whether People Write You Back” and it was eye-opening. This one was funny and informative too. Some of the comedy was just laughing at the myths presented that I knew were flawed. Even funnier is that I have photos where I smile, and wear more than a normal shirt. Must delete them! Lol.

  34. Nightowl

    Nice work, as well as informative. However, I think I could have told you beforehand that the relative “value” of shirtless pictures for a guy depends on how good they look without the shirt.

    We’ve all heard ad nauseum about how much “less visual” than men women are, hence the comparative lack of success of magazines featuring male “nudity” over those featuring female “nudity.” But I think the overlooked factor is that while pictures of a woman’s breasts bared are considered nudity, pictures of a male with his chest bared are not, and women have MANY more outlets in which to see something that excites them visually than the relatively restricted outlets in which baring women’s breasts is allowed. They’ve always looked just as much as men, they just don’t have to ask for the magazines under the counter.

    I think the reason older women are less attracted to chest-baring pictures is multifactorial. But primarily, all else being equal, a middle-aged male who keeps his body in six-pack ab shape is probably presumed to spend a lot of time working on their physical appearance, fighting time and nature. I think mature women who see a mature man in that kind of shape probably think that he is too involved with making himself physically attractive to the opposite sex and wants a lot of attention from them, and therefore probably is less likely a one-woman, faithful man than someone who is more average and puts less emphasis on being physically/sexually attractive. By middle age and later, they are less likely driven by procreation programming and less inclined to put themselves in a situation where they feel they are competing versus one which they feel is likely more stable once attachments are formed.

    But, this is all strictly IMHO, and I could be wrong.

  35. Wagnerian

    So…. this measure’s how women respond to men and how men to respond to women, but there’s no info on same sex response? Gee thanks OK Cupid.

    The gays don’t matter? Or am I missing something?

  36. David

    Can you release the data you used? It’d be interesting to calculate the standard deviations and confidence intervals.

  37. Mat

    This is awesome, love the statistical stuff.

    I don’t really send messages, I just sort of tinker around with my profile to see what will get me messages. It’s all one big experiment so I love these articles. Also, apparently the more photos you have, the more messages you get – something this study didn’t cover, but Plenty Of Fish has looked at.

  38. WS

    The “flirty lip-pursing thing” is actually called “the duck face”

    http://antiduckface.com/

    Nice read…

  39. ReL

    Wow, how interesting! And I agree with Ralph, the shuttlecock is more interesting than her flirty face. Just like the girl with the guitar!

  40. Mike Pooposterous

    Really interesting analysis! I’m glad that photos of people “doing something interesting” generates the most meaningful contacts. It makes sense…deep down inside most people are afraid of finding the person who has no life and nothing to talk about.

  41. Anon

    @lakrids,
    }} quote Peter “we’re all individuals”
    } Talk for you self. I am not.

    Shouldn’t that be ‘We are not’

  42. jazzbo02

    Thanks for the info. I’m putting it to work! This whole project reminds me of the old Firesign Theater album “Everything you know is wrong!”

    What about the effects of picture quality-too dark, too bright, fuzzy or grainy image, off-colors(not intentional-bad printing/balance). Then, how about color vs black and white vs sepia-tone, etc.

  43. Again, queer people don’t exist, right? Neither do trans, intersex, or gender variant people.

    I’ll have you know that there are many, many trans, intersex, gender variant, genderqueer, lesbian, gay, bisexual, pansexual folks who use okcupid. It’s really fucked up that you keep publishing these “findings” and making claims to some sort of “universal” implications for everybody when you totally ignore the many of us whose sexualities and gender identities fall outside of your narrow range of possibilities.

    All your shit is about “women” responding to “men” and vice-versa. First off there are gay and lesbian people out there and they don’t appreciate being ignored in a study that claims to make claims about everybody. And secondly there are those of us who fall outside of the gender binary.

    But of course you guys just don’t get it…

  44. andrea

    yeah do this is all gravy and stuff and pretty interesting but I am a Lesbian. Any studies for gay people available? I suspect the results in my case might be a little different.

  45. OMG.

    Absolutely. Effing. Brilliant.

    A superb concept, superb article, superb delivery and execution. I’ve always liked OK Cupid and the unique take they have on dating/matching, and this just elevated it to the next level.

    Rock on :)
    -J

  46. Michael

    I like the work that you have done, however, I am curious as to why you have finalized your data pool with only 7.140 users.

    It seems to me that having such a low number of individuals that were sampled that it would skew your results and make them less accurate. I could just be reading it wrong, but I would be very interested in reading full report if you could email it to me (as I believe this is just a synopsis of your complete research).

    Thank You,

    Michael O. Johnston, MPA

  47. anon again

    I agree with Anon – Good job making the analysis readable and accessible to the online dating audience (the ones who it applies to most), but the statistics/regression/confidence intervals are meaningful to some of us.

  48. As a serious amateur photographer who has shot hundreds of people, mostly guys, for their online profile pics, I always urge subjects to let me know, after a month or two, which pictures were most effective in terms of attracting the sort of persons they wanted to meet.
    Your scientific findings reinforce my unscientific conclusions, namely, that looking smart, safe and interesting is more important than sexy (unless, of course, the abs or boobs are truly remarkable).
    Another rule I recommend for profile pics: if you’re over 30, keep your clothes on!
    Congratulations on a well-researched and presented study.
    Devan Sloane
    Northampton, Massachusetts

  49. Spyder

    I can definitely confirm that posing with animals is great win for a male. Since I posted a picture of myself with my long haired Dachshund, even when I’ve made no attempt to contact anyone, I get contacted pretty frequently

  50. Jimmy

    The last two blog posts contained entirely hetero-normative research. What gives?