This week we will confront an unfortunate truth of online dating: no matter how much time you spend polishing your profile, honing your IM banter, and perfecting your message introductions, it’s your picture that matters most.
We’re going to look at how your photos affect both the messages you get and how successful your own outgoing messages are. We all know that beautiful people are more successful daters, but let’s quantify by exactly how much.
To illustrate the exact spectrum of looks we’re talking about here, and to put some human faces on our discussion, I want to introduce a few photos of real OkCupid users. Here are two women near the top of our range.
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And here are two rated in the middle.
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As for photos at the bottom of the curve, it didn’t feel right to write someone and say “can I use you to illustrate the concept of ugliness on my blog?” so you’ll just have to extrapolate.
The above featured users have graciously agreed to let me post their pictures, so please don’t make them regret it. Funnily enough, I had to write about a dozen beautiful female users before anyone would even get back to me. Life imitates blog!
Anyhow, I know attractiveness is far from a universal concept, but maybe keep these folks in mind as we go through the data.
We’ll start with a simple line chart. The information I’ll present in this post is not normalized because, as we’ll see, it’s interesting how men and women evaluate looks differently.
Our chart shows how men have rated women, on a scale from 0 to 5. The curve is symmetric and surprisingly charitable: a woman is as likely to be considered extremely ugly as extremely beautiful, and the majority of women have been rated about “medium.” The chart looks normalized, even though it’s just the unfiltered opinions of our male users.
Given the popular wisdom that Hollywood, the Internet, and Photoshop have created unrealistic expectations of how a woman should look, I found the fairness and, well, realism, of this gray arc kind of heartening.
Now let’s superimpose the distribution of actual messages guys have sent:
When it comes down to actually choosing targets, men choose the modelesque. Someone like roomtodance
2/3 of male messages go to the top 1/3 of women.
above gets nearly 5 times as many messages as a typical woman and 28 times as many messages as a woman at the low end of our curve. Site-wide, two-thirds of male messages go to the best-looking third of women. So basically, guys are fighting each other 2-for-1 for the absolute best-rated females, while plenty of potentially charming, even cute, girls go unwritten.
The medical term for this is male pattern madness.
The female equivalent of the above chart shows a different bias:
As you can see from the gray line, women rate an incredible 80% of guys as worse-looking than medium. Very harsh. On the other hand, when it comes to actual messaging, women shift their expectations only just slightly ahead of the curve, which is a healthier pattern than guys’ pursuing the all-but-unattainable. But with the basic ratings so out-of-whack, the two curves together suggest some strange possibilities for the female thought process, the most salient of which is that the average-looking woman has convinced herself that the vast majority of males aren’t good enough for her, but she then goes right out and messages them anyway.
Just to illustrate that women are operating on a very different scale, here are just a few of the many, many guys we here in the office think are totally decent-looking, but that women have rated, in their occult way, as significantly less attractive than so-called “medium”:
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Females of OkCupid, we site founders say to you: ouch! Paradoxically, it seems it’s women, not men, who have unrealistic standards for the “average” member of the opposite sex.
Finally, I just want to combine the two charts to emphasize how much fuller the inboxes of good-looking people get. I have scaled this graph to show multiples of messages sent to the lowest-rated people. For instance, the most attractive guys get 11× the messages the lowest-rated do. The medium-rated get about 4×.
This graph also dramatically illustrates just how much more important a woman’s looks are than a guy’s.
Now let’s take a look at how senders’ and recipients’ attractivenesses affect reply rates, not just the number of messages sent.
As you’d expect, more attractive people get more replies. And since they themselves get so many more messages than everyone else, they write back much less frequently. Here’s the graph for female senders, plotted in evenly-spaced “attractiveness groups.”
And here’s the one for male senders.
One interesting thing seems to be going on here: when the best-looking men write the worst-looking women, taste the rainbow,
of self-esteem issues their message success rate takes a big hit. The knee-jerk response would be to somehow chalk it up to hunky spammers, but we very carefully control for that in these articles, and in any event why would better-looking girls be drastically more susceptible to it? It seems to be some kind of self-confidence thing.
As we did before, I’m going to consolidate the line charts to show just how your attractiveness changes how often your messages get responses.
This post has been the preamble to the larger discussion of “what makes a good profile?” We’ve spent a lot of time on OkTrends looking at messages, and since your profile is the other important place you express yourself, we thought it deserved the same treatment.
I wanted to address physical attractiveness right at the start, because obviously it’s a huge factor in how successful your profile is. In the upcoming posts in this series, we’re going to control for attractiveness, so that we can deliver real and useful advice for all the non-models out there.
We’ll look at, among other things: what makes a good picture (is it taken outside? inside? is it full-body? a head-shot? with your pet snake? what?), what kinds of self-presentation will get you the most messages (jokey? flirty? all business?), and how much profile information is too much. Should be good.
To say that all women are shallow is a bit besides the point.
I cant speak about all the female nation – but i find the stats interesting enough to look- a second time!
I can understands mans way of doing things – It’s normal for a man to look for a woman based on physical features only. I would hope that women are not only going for the spunk – but someone able to have a intellgient talk about over dinner![not omg i’m so beautifull!- Yes you better believe it gents there are still fabio’s out there on okc! ]
You can say that women are shallow. From what i know about being born a woman- little is about the picture itself but i would say the proofs in the pudding with the profile matching or not.
[ if i dont have an interest in trance music it’s not like i’m going to bust a move doing that! ]
@djsnarkay:
I guess you missed the blog post where they discussed racism, months before they wrote about this, and just assumed that the world would validate your snarky preconceptions.
Get thee to thy holier-than-thou high horse, dude. Get thee to thy damn horse.
Wait a minute… wait just one second! Let me see if I get this straight, let me see if I can wrap my head around this…. ATTRACTIVE PEOPLE GET MORE MAIL AT ONLINE DATING SITES!?! Really? Being completely brain dead and having 0 powers of observation, I so totally would not have put that together. See, I always assumed people who look like large slugs and have little to no hair get all the dates. Well, color me embarrassed!
Thanks for dispelling this rumor – this is very insightful information for people who, like me, are complete fucking morons.
What one person finds attractive isn’t necessarily what everyone else does. I’d wager a bet that most of the men in my 4-5 star categories fall into the 2-3 star categories for other female users.. As for the blonde haired muscled surfers that I’m sure many other women rate 4-5, they get 2-3 from me.. it all has to do with type. And I don’t just rate based on looks (sure that factors in) but a moderately attractive guy with a witty and pensive profile gets higher ratings more than often..
just my thoughts..
There are a lot of ugly women out there having sex with good looking guys, just because they’ll put out. It doesn’t mean the ugly women are hot, but you’d be surprised how many women are confused on that issue.
So, I would predict, if we were to plot the median number of sexual partners vs attractiveness, the men’s curve would be a steep slope, strongly favoring the 5. The women’s curve would probably look like the first graph, a normal curve, with a mild skew to the 5.
Ultimately, this all is due to the sexual selection process (not the dating selection process). A man’s animal drive is to out-breed his fellow men, and will dip down below their own level of attractiveness to get laid. The women’s natural animal drive says “lay down with the most fit mate possible.” and typically they start at their own attractiveness level and go up from there.
I am wondering what the causation is between the “relative attractiveness” of the male population is relative to the “profiles.
It seems that perhaps despite the the fact that the women rated most of them men “less attractive”, the women still responded to their profile.
In addition, i think there should be a little more data on the type of contact each of the gender’s replied with. IE was the initial message a “friendly, sexual, funny, sincere” approach?
Certainly all this is starting to delve well beyond the original scope of “what makes for a good picture”.
Please do this for the GAYS I’m SO curious. I KNOW we be doin stuff. lol
Any plans for you to release any/all of these data sets? (after anonymization of course)
This chart doesnt apply to me i guess
I am a chubby chaser ala Thick chick.
most trouble I run into I guess is the recipients disbelief that I am genuinely interested.
that and I suppose those women are ether no participating in the ok cupid experience or I hate to say it , confidence issues?
If there is a good reason for placing those two women in the medium — as opposed to the top — category, I cannot see it. I think they should sue.
Seems from the data that men’s and women’s ideals are keeping them from finding or exploring the larger dating pool of good candidates. I think a profile is best used to gather conversation topics from than anything. Beautiful models can be just as detrimental to one’s swagger as any snaggle-toothed quazimodos, and perhaps even more so. Keep it real, Cupids!
Yes, people get over it. Online dating in and of itself is a very shallow experience. It can never replace real life. If you want to get more dates, then I suggest you get some nice clothes, go out and meet someone. It is soooo much easier. I get responded to on here, but I get way more action in real life. When things like dating are done online, it just brings out the ‘shallow truth” a lot more that’s all. You wouldn’t know the type of personality I had from just looking at my profile, that’s for sure.
You just now figuring this out, I’ve known it for years. Women are unrealistic in the men they think they can attract. It’s always been that way for the most part. To most women most men aren’t good enough for them. That’s the reason so many messages go unanswered. It’s been this way since the beginning of time. No man is good enough. But she finally settles only to find out later that the guy she settled for either wasn’t good enough for her or she finds out that the guy she settled for is the best thing that ever happened to her. For a lot of them there pickyness keeps them single for ever and the die alone.
As a shorter male, since I started reading this blog, I’ve really been interested in seeing how HEIGHT affects reply rates, if at all. I wonder if there are any plans to relay that data. (ie, do shorter guys get less replies? Do taller girls get less?)
I would also like to see the correlation between height and number of responses.
So I think what we can all take away from this is the following:
Girls don’t know what they want but are sure they aren’t good enough for it.
Boys think they know what they want but don’t know they’re not good enough for it.
And that’s why statistically the happiest relationships are most often those where the woman and the man both agree that the woman is the more attractive of the two.
I’m sure that attractiveness is a bigger factor for choosing people to pursue in real life than it is for choosing people to pursue online. Appearance is all you have when you’re checking out people on the street or at a bar.
@Kenpar: Different experiences for different people. I found meeting people IRL to date to be incredibly awkward. Also, I don’t know why you think that messaging someone on a dating site because they are attractive, can spell, and have interesting hobbies is more shallow than talking to someone at a party because they are attractive and are wearing nice clothes.
One thing that you don’t mention is that all the women who seem so critical of men’s appearances also have another characteristic, that is they are looking for dates online. Perhaps the reason they are looking for dates online is that the real world dating scene has been unfavorable to them because of their unrealistic attitude.
One of the male users ranked “in the middle” doesn’t reply very often. Hmmmm, what about that.
If a super-hot guy writes me, an average-looking woman, it’s 99.99% of the time because he’s out for a one night stand and thinks I’ll be easy. I have no interest in that, so of course I don’t write back.
Also, I think it’s just true that there are more good-looking women out there than good-looking men. And I say this as a straight woman! Women tend to put more care into their appearance, for one thing. Luckily, as you point out, looks matter more to men than women – which is not the same as saying they don’t matter to women at all!
I arrived at this same conclusion many years ago, and one of my favorite activities was creating profiles on dating sites with pictures of “drop dead gorgeous” men.
It’s true, the volume of email was quite large.
If you indicated successful professional, wealthy, and other such attributes it went through the roof!
I particularly enjoyed sending women on a hunt to nowhere as I agreed to meet them on Friday or Saturday nights (and I never showed up).
It was fun manipulating such shallow people.
These posts are amazingly insightful, not for the profile information, but for the sociological implications. Awesome! Keep them coming
mrmr001: the main reason the ‘most attractive’ women are rated that way is because they posed prettily in their pictures. That’s all.
It doesn’t tell you anything about what they look like in real life, just how artistic they are with photographs.
I’m curious to see what part AGE plays in attractiveness as well as messages sent/received. Both of the females (and males, now that I look at them) listed in the “top of the range” look really young.
I asked this question earlier but it seems not to have gotten posted:
Where on OKC do people rate other users based on photos alone? Is it a forum? Could somebody tell me which one? And why should we think that users of this forum (male or female) are representative of OKC users generally?
thanks so much for your continued efforts to include queer folks as a meaningful part of the population. you’re really making friends here.
I too would love to see some data sets…
I do, however, have a criticism.
While I presume you’ve included about any control I could come up with.
While I do think it is better, or at least more Politically Correct…to include in ratings or assessments of “attractiveness” more than mere looks…even the larger picture of physical attractiveness, personality and how one can express themselves.
Still.
I’ve been on OkCupid long enough to a remember a time when there were TWO star rating options…if I’ve recalled their designations properly, we had “looks” and “personality” to rate and match up with as we found ourselves admiring our admirers and whatnot.
I guess my criticism, or rather my QUESTION is- how have you corrected or approached this data with the rating switch over taken into consideration…or do you presume more than mere apparent physical characteristics go into the rating of attractiveness? Did you actually just lump all data of the site INCLUDING the old rating system and round out the numbers?
Please, do tell.
Having looked at the male models that were used in the study as examples of “attractive” and “average,” I have to say I see a problem with the objectivity of this study. I’d rate the “average” models as “attractive” and vice versa. Plus, I’d say the same about the female models. I saw little difference between the women cited as being at the top of the range of feminine attractiveness and those located as being in the middle. (I agree with mrmr001.) Trying to quantify and graph sometime so qualitative as attractiveness is simply methodologically invalid.
This (the deep qualitativeness of personal attraction, that is) is one reason that I feel I’m a crummy ok cupid user. A good deal about a person doesn’t come across in the 2-D virtual medium of the on-line social network, and I know that I’ve passed up a lot of decent guys for no good reason. Perhaps I’ve been passed over, too. But maybe one day something will click. Or double-click.
I only got through a small portion of this blog before I had to stop and make a comment regarding the “Female Messaging & Male Attractiveness” graph vs. the “Male Messaging & Female Attractiveness” graph. If you are using the 1 out of 5 star rating as the basis of how attractive someone is, you have to think about how people choose how many stars a person receives.
When I rate someone out of 5 stars, I’m not just looking at their picture. I actually read the whole profile and if the guy is hot as Hell but dumb as a stick, lazier than a sloth (so lazy he can’t even type full words or bother with grammar/spelling) and has such characteristics as “more sloppy,” “more greedy,” and drinks, smokes and does drugs often, it doesn’t matter AT ALL how physically attractive he is. I’m also not here for dating, so when I’m rating someone it has more to do with their personality and how well I think I’d get along with them (comparing both the match percentages and the entirety of their written profile, including journals, tests etc.), if they are physically attractive it’s a bonus.
So, in short it may not be that women have high standards when it comes to attractiveness, it’s that they aren’t just rating physical appearances. On the other hand, I’ve gotten many messages from guys on the site who say something along the lines of “ur cute/hot/attractive, wanna chat?” or else have obviously not read one word of my profile before messaging me.
Even briefer, bring back the double star system where you vote both on personality and physical attractiveness and then compare your results.
a spade is a spade.. when you try to meet someone online, the easiest method of forming a judgement on the attractiveness of a person is how they look.
Even in real life, at a bar, the office- you ogle at the babe/hunk – perhaps realistically you ask someone else out but your eyes (and hope?) follow what is beautiful. Shallow as it may seem. The better looking you are the more ‘hits’ you get everywhere.
Why is it the ‘top attractive’ pictures are girls of about 18-20 where as the ‘middle attractive’ pictures are women in their mid 20-early 30s.
ageist and misleading photos imo…yes i know you must have had to just use people who replied but surely there must have been 4 examples from within the same age group
To a considerable degree, I rate people’s profiles on the basis of my assessment of their personality, character, attitude, and intelligence. My ratings are overwhelmingly based on the profiles’ textual content — the essays written, the journal posts, the captions underneath the pics, the personality trait badges, the test results, and/or my interactions with them. I never rate people’s profiles purely or primarily on the basis of their physical attractiveness.
I gather you are using the star rating 1-5 as a measure of physical attractiveness, but I for one have not been using it that way. I don’t usually rate someone at all unless I’ve read their profile and formulated an overall opinion about them. So I don’t know what method other people use to rate people, but I don’t think it’s valid to assume that the numbers measure physical attractiveness, especially in the case of women’s evaluations. Men notoriously evaluate women based on looks and women notoriously evaluate men based on other factors–like perceived status and income. So I think your question is flawed and the means of answering it seems flawed as well. Anyway, that might account for the seemingly harsher numbers in women’s evaluations.
In other words, yeah, those average guy photos look fine. But what did they SAY in their profiles? Enquiring minds want to know.
I was also interested in women’s apparent reluctance to answer seemingly attractive men. As you may know, women respond to two different kinds of attractive men, the heavy-browed quicky guy and the calm, glasses wearing LTR guy who will actually change diapers and stick with it. I can easily imagine that women are resisting the urge to write back to the heavy browed guys who may be attractive and fun for 2 months, but who are less likely to be a good long term mate.
not so sure the two females at the top are better looking….just that they look 17?
mrmr001……um, hi. the photos ‘in the medium’ were based on numbers. they are actually ‘medium.’ did you see the graphs? the whole thing is statistically based, not opinion based.
When you check for girls’ interest in guys, please check for signs the guy is an “alpha male” (leadership roles, number of friends, other people’s interest in them, creativity, hobbies like musician who stands on stage, actors, …) if this can be measured at all. I’d like to see the data on that.
I find the popular sensibilities very strange! For the women you show, I would agree that the “top of the curve” women are exceptionally beautiful (at least according to a certain standard) and the middle ones look, y’know, realistically in the middle. For the men though I really can’t understand the difference, and note that I’m a woman myself. I would rate all four of the guys pretty equally and probably the “top of the curve” ones a little lower! And the “significantly below average” ones? Again, I can’t see much of a difference. But I suppose it’s nothing new for me to understand male thinking better than that of other females…
I just want to know why the chicks pictured had their info included and not the men… The guy pictured on the far right is flippin’ adorable!!
I’m going to make a very mean suggestion about why the men’s and women’s attractiveness rating charts don’t mirror each other- I think they reflect the actual attractiveness distribution of people on okc – that is, there’s a normalized curve of women as far as looks go, while then men on okc tend to be less attractive than the population at large. I think the best evidence to support this is that your supposed example of “best looking” guys from the site are only about as attractive as the “medium” girls you chose. Now, you may argue this is just me being one of those awful women with skewed standards, except that I am also a woman who finds plenty of men I interact with IRL on the 3-5 end of the 5-point scale. So, I’m not harsh on guys in general, just, apparently, the ones on here. (Though I’d say an even distribution of 3’s 4’s and 5’s show up in my match search)
I would really like to see a statistical analysis of match distance to message rate. As a rural user, I have found that I have never received a message that I did not initiate and I can’t help but wonder if it is related to the fact that my nearest match over 50% is 70 miles away.
[i]This graph also dramatically illustrates just how much more important a woman’s looks are than a guy’s. [/i]
I highly disagree that this conclusion is logical from the presented graph. Social expectations of men being the ones who are supposed to write first could easily bump male-sent messages up (and thus increase female recipients) by a significant margin.
brilliant (and very interesting) work.
Another interesting point of this study, which most people are overlooking, is how attractiveness also relates to how “considerate” the recipient of a message is. Message success is determined by whether or not a recipient replies to the sender. A message can be considered “successful” even if the recipient sends a polite and short “no thanks” reply. And how hard is it to tell someone over email that you’re not interested? Not hard at all.
Now you can say that more attractive people get more messages, so it might take more time for them to reply and vice versa. But because the time to send a “no thanks” reply is relatively short, the time spent to reply to more senders is still relatively low. So this study can also indirectly show that less attractive people are also more considerate of people that send them messages. I don’t know about other people, but on average and to a certain extent, I generally find that people get nicer as their physical attractiveness drops. Their physical beauty cannot speak for them, so their inner beauty increases as a result. And I’m not trying to put down all the attractive people out there.
Woman are pretty Judgmental, way more judgmental then men……… I’ve emailed hundreds of woman on this web sight, and noon of the really good looking ones usually email me back, or they just email me once and that’s it. Its as if they are way less interested in meeting people….
But that explains why all the good looking woman on this web sight usually stay single for a very, very long time……..
It makes me want to swap my picture with someone who is attractive… I can’t even get a reply when I ask a totally innocent and completely relevant question about something interesting in a woman’s profile.
It’s pretty depressing, actually. Darnit!
I’m curious as to the ratio of guys initiating the first contact verses women. Also, what is it about the women that do make the first contact? Why do they do it?
It might be interested to apply these results to gay and bi people, too. I’d also be interested in seeing what the ratio is of bi-identified females responding to men vs women. Thanks!
@kenpar
The old fashioned way just doesn’t work for everyone. Thank the heavens for the Internet.
Interesting blog. I agree with some of the other posters as I have the same problem. I think it is a self-confidence issue. I am not runway ready, so if a man I find really attractive messages me – instead of being like “Go for it!” and messaging back I think “Well this must be a mistake. Maybe he thinks I am something that I am not. I had better end it before it begins.” So I don’t message him back.
But what we *really* want to know:
Which of my pictures are attractive to the people that I’m attracted to?