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.
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 about 50% more than men do and make that flirty-face four times as often.
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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.
The MySpace Angle Is Busted
The universally-maligned MySpace angle is achieved by holding your camera above your head and being just so darn coy.
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We were sure these pictures were 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).
Weird.
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
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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.
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:
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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.
This is really the best part of OKCupid! Thanks, Christian and team!
I’m very confused by the first “myth”…
“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 good advice.”
But wait, your graph shows that the 2 most effective types of photos are making eye contact, and that 2 of the 3 most effective are smiling. So… wouldn’t that indicate that looking happy and making eye contact in fact IS good advice?
Over the course of several years, I’ve continually tinkered with my profile content, including pics, and I have to say the results don’t surprise me at all. Articles like this are so fascinating, I have trouble leaving the site. I wish I knew how to quit you, OKC.
Interesting read, but one should not end a sentance with a preposition too.
I think you’re doing some incredible stuff here. It would be interesting if your analyses are incorporated into the match/recommendation system.
Researchers in machine learning nowadays rely on Amazon Turk ( mturk.com ) to get loads of annotations. I use it in my research. Obviously the more numbers you have, the more significant of your results. The quicker you can get data, the faster you can publish these studies to your blog.
(By the way, I am not affiliated with Amazon or anything.)
OKCupid is the best thing since sliced bread. Keep up the good work!
followed advice, in less than 24 hours 5 new people looked at my profile. previously it had been about a week since anybody clicked on it. So far it does seem to be working. good job guys, another great post.
Fizz – cry me a river.
Granted, I’ll accept it’s not fun to get messages from people who just want to get off with you, especially when you don’t like them.
Still – it’s a message, and amongst the douches are also gems. Men do not have a magic method of attracting attention to their profile that takes no effort on their part other than a bit of favourable lighting, angles and a nice bra.
Men may try and chat someone up after only examining the pictures, but so do women (albeit, usually with a less direct sex angle). If I was a woman finding it difficult to search for someone, damn right I’d put in a cleavage picture. Messages can always be deleted and you get used to ignoring the pervy messages (yes, had those from both men and women).
Awesome bit of information there thanks for sharing!
“Abbie
It frustrates me that you equate the star rating to an ‘attractiveness’ rating. I, for one, do not use it like that.”
I agree on that one, although I remember before there were separate looks and personality star ratings now there is only one which is ill-defined.
Out of all the pics on this post, the flirty towards the camera are defo the ones I want to message more – who’s that girl bottom right on the top collage of photos?
With such a huge data set, I believe the correlations you present, but I wonder about the influence of other variables: what effect does a misspelling in the caption have for somebody who scored higher on the intelligence test? who scored lower?
Measuring response to photo attractiveness, match percentage etc, do any variables correlate to what people respond to? (do men truly respond more to attractiveness than women?) etc
this is stupid. thanks for breaking down my attempts to socialize into a way of telling me that without visual appeal, i will never meet anyone. Why not just start up an OKC eugenics program. Fuck all of this.
i hate my life.
Since you only picked profiles that have one photo, it’s hard to know how this advice applies to a mix of photos. For example it may be that an attribute of a photo that is a severe drawback when that photo is the *only* one on the profile, doesn’t hurt at all, or maybe even helps, when that photo is part of a set where other photos don’t share that attribute. And it would be very unsurprising if the mere fact of having multiple photos helps people.
Can you think of ways to try this again for multiphoto profiles?
Regarding myth #2: might the success of “MySpace” shots have more to do with the age of subjects (and tangentially, their attractiveness) as it has to do with any of the more difficult to measure factors that you mention?
The use of only single-photo profiles kind of makes the data harder to make use of. Of course, it also makes it -much- easier to work with. I’d like to see how addition or removal of a cleavage/abs/MySpace etc shot changes things. That would be a MUCH bigger undertaking.
Also of interest would be to see how long conversations lasted, essentially applying the “actual conversation” filter to the rest of the things you looked at.
Finally, is there any way to control for the guys showing abs being more likely to have nice bodies? In other words, is it their bodies or their ab shots showing them off that draw messages?
Never thought of it so Scientifically, good attempt at being statistically accurate with such a blend of variables.
Sometimes people ask for specific things like close face shot or a look at the abs etc. in an introduction letter or on listings at CL. So, one could extrapolate from that the content of a profile should have these elements if they are attractive attributes one has or leave out if not an attribute in order to increase establishment of success.
Thus the attractive curve mean fit filter to avoid the attractive or handsome skew to the curve; nice job.
To Simon — Read the Ladder Theory. The reason you’re having difficulty is that you’re reaching too many rungs on the ladder above your own social value. AKA, if you’re fat, you can get a date, as long as you date fat chicks. Yes it is cruel, but that’s how the world works. This analysis only confirms that hot people get all the attention, despite what polite society says to the contrary about “personality” etc. People make themselves unhappy when their self-perception about their social value is higher than what others have rated them at. If you want a girl who’s an 8 and you’re a 4, you’ll never get her. The only way is to raise yourself up to at least a 6.
Very interesting read, I love that you have people pulling this kind of data from the site – Very cool!
Wow, this is quite brilliant! A very interesting research you have got there, thanx for sharing
And one more thing, I’d comment the piece about MySpace Shot “No change: it’s still the best shot; better, in fact, than straight-up boob pics”. Maybe pics taken “by holding your camera above your head and being just so darn coy” are how guys get to see us by their sides in the real life (considering the difference in height)?
While I doubt that ratings of me really averaged out to a 4 or 5, when I was on OkCupid for about a month I got about 20-30 messages (I am a Straight Male) and I didn’t really message anyone myself. In any event, I would have rated about half of those who messaged me as 4-5s and maybe they wouldn’t really have average scores that high but I really just want to see the data for the more attractive people.
I may have been a little bit generous with my 4s just to see who found me attractive. I only gave out a few 5’s though… still obviously the men are interested in dating 4s and 5s mostly, so how about seeing just their data also.
I may have automatically voted a 3 or lower if they included religious stuff in their things they couldn’t live without either… was the star rating supposed to be based on looks only?
I’m shallow I know, but it appeared at least a fair amount of women in my area found me to be cute enough to warrant being… particular. (Although, maybe since I ignored winks and only really spoke to people who messaged me first, I was just exposed to more aggressive women and maybe they are more likely to tell someone they are attractive?)
Please calculate the relationship between abs shown and women met per attempt based on the *woman’s* age. That will determine whether older abs are less attractive or whether older women find body shots less interesting.
Picture without showing face eh?
The ladder theory is utter crap, aside from one fundamental point : people generally decide very quickly if they’re going to have sex with you. If someone has decided they don’t find you sexy and your sole intention is dating, wasting more time on them is not a good idea – however, bear in mind that there’s something wrong if that’s the basis of your relationship.
Simon – you have to work with what you’ve got. If you’re not very pretty, you’d better have other attributes that compensate for your below average showing in that area.
Don’t overcompensate. It is not necessary to be the best – it is only necessary to be good enough. Once a baseline of attractiveness/money/domesticity/personality/athleticism/cooking/artistic ability etc is reached, further ability may not necessarily make you any more datable.
In online dating, women are able to be very picky. Play up your good points, try to minimise the poor ones. Writing e-mails and IM gives a better chance at forming a conversation than some real life situations, but does not show body language and true appearance.
Online dating is something to do in the spare time when you’re not doing anything else – it should not be the exclusive way to meet people. If you have plenty of time to do online dating in your own time (rather than skiving at work), you do not have sufficient social life – fix that first.
Realise the truth is definitely not that ‘you can’t meet anyone’ it’s that you can’t meet the sort of people you want. Exposing yourself to lots of people (no, not in that way…), improving yourself and being realistic about your standards is the way to go. If your social life is good enough, even if you don’t find someone you’ll enjoy more of your life.
regarding your chart on “chance a message leads to an actual conversation” did you control for the fact that other types of photos, like the myspace shot, get more total messages? in theory someone getting lots more messages will end up having fewer conversations with the sender of any one of those messages. so i think that graph has to have some weighting put into it to account for bias.
Nobody really likes myspace and chest shots in real life. the only reason they’re successful on the site is because the dummy-heads who like those shots are also posting them and using sites like this ten times as much as everyone else. booooo.
I gotta say guys, some of this stuff is amazing.
Although I’m not a psychologist, I don’t see why this sort of thing couldn’t be submitted to the academic community as a proper research paper!
On the boob pics working better for women as they get older, I think it’s a fairly obvious reason. The average woman at 30 or so still willing to show off her boobs in low-cut shirts etc. is much more likely to be attractive than the average woman at 18 willing to show off her boobs.
Can you link the profiles of the profile pictures you showcased in this post? Some of the people are very cute!
Can you make this data publicly available? Perhaps you can de-identify it first (remove private information) and then release it. I would love to play around with it.
Concerning the increased messages because of showing cleavage, is there a way to compare if the increase in messages received also resulted in an increase in messaged replied? The point is to figure out if seeing cleavage generates an increase in meaningful messages that generate a reply, or does a girl who shows her boobs just get more messages that say “ur hot” or “nice tits”. The classic quality vs quantity debate. What would really be interesting is if not having a cleavage picture generated less messages, but more messages that generated a reply.
The MySpace photos work because they “cutify” you – they put your eyes closer to the camera and make them look bigger – they makes your chin smaller – you’re looking up, so you lose any double chin. Voila – a younger you who looks more like a manga character. It’s like magic!
What about men who take pictures with their ex-girlfriends or a bunch of girls? That’s a HUGE turn off for me. My thinking is if you’re so hot and have all of these girls over you, why are you searching for dates online?
I’d think the people using the “myspace” shot would tend younger, and thus trend cuter and more sought-after. Does the myspace thing hold up after you’re controlling for age?
Enjoy reading the OK Trends. The profile photo is the #1 attention grabber. Singles could use all the help they can get. As far as the “shelf life” of women is concerned, advertise online what you look like offline and dress age appropriate.
@JulieSpira
What Jesse said – generally you don’t have to work on your body at 18-25 to maintain it and mostly have a decent pair of breasts. After that some effort is needed to stay fit. A woman or man who looks good in their mid thirties will look good, or at least average, in a few years. One who already looks worn out is only going to get worse.
Brett – it’s obvious that the prettier you are (includes showing off nice breasts) the more attention received, both positive and negative. The only difference from real life is that it’s easier to be obnoxious online. Upset by people concentrating on your breasts? Tough. People with lots of interest can cut down their suitors to find someone – those without the magical big boobies or similar have to work a lot harder to generate interest from nowhere.
As a big fan of large breasts I appreciate a cleavage shot to show me I’ll be having fun in bed. Even so breasts aren’t the primary factor in choosing someone – they’re only a decider in the absence of other items and basically means the woman in question’s profile is boring. Ladies, if you’re flat chested you had better be really interesting. If you follow the standard rubbish of pubs, films and TV with nothing else about you, big breasts might swing the deal for a fling or a short relationship – I still won’t be marrying you though – that’s reserved for the fun and fascinating female regardless of the size of her breasts.
Real life isn’t any different. Unless your amazing personality shines through, there’s no way I’m wasting my time on someone that appears boring and plain. I’d rather at least find someone that turns me on and see if they have a brain. Show me you have a brain, and I’ll overlook your body.
Welcome the fact that OkCupid planning to offer blind dates soon. Hope more success ensues.
Peter, you claim that the ladder theory complete and utter crap, but the advice you gave to Simon (good advice) really is no different than what “Tyler Durden” said. “Exposing yourself to lots of people (no, not in that way…), improving yourself and being realistic about your standards is the way to go.” is just a more articulate and descriptive way of saying “If you want a girl who’s an 8 and you’re a 4, you’ll never get her. The only way is to raise yourself up to at least a 6.”
Are the women pictured in this post really supposed to be “average”?
Excellent stuff, I really love it when people point out that marketing is actually science.
I can’t wait for the blind dates! Kinda wish I was still single for that… I always thought my photo accuracy was pretty high.
Makes sense the men would smile less – they need to effect the manly “sexy serious stare” to be cool and not thought effeminate (in their own minds).
Yeah, now if I only know how to look a lot better every day, then I think I could take pictures that would make me a lot more datable.
What was the std dev for the data in the first “myth”? The numbers are useless without that.
Why are women’s stats measured as ‘contacts per month’ and men’s as ‘women met per attempt’? Seems like some very sexist assumptions behind that. Wait, a dating site, based on gender stereotypes? I never.
Here’s a thought: How about the men’s photos that DON’T show their “happy trail” or evidence of where it used to be? As a healthy woman in her prime, I appreciate a good 6-pack as much as anyone, and kudos to those who work hard to achieve them. BUT I have no interest in what amounts to soft-porn photos. Men, if you wouldn’t send the picture to your MOTHER, then it’s not appropriate, and for me, not EVEN interesting. Leave a little to my imagination, will ya? The 80’s are SO over, already.
A couple comments here:
— First, as mentioned above, it’s a little…odd…that you’ve chosen to measure success differently for men and for women. In the past when discussing the success-rate of various attributes here, you’ve used messages-received *and* messages-replied-to for both men and women. Why the change in methodology here? Or if you’re convinced this metric is superior, why not apply it for women as well?
(My suspicion is that dividing by messages sent is messing up your data. Imagine someone who is a bit shy and only ever tries to initiate a conversation once, instead choosing to wait and see who writes to them first. The metric you’re using would be placing them *far too high* on your chart, and I imagine this is why you haven’t used it for women. I really enjoy reading your blog here, so please take this as constructive criticism.)
— Second, I think you’re wrong in your assumptions about the “Myspace shot.” If you had a group of people (women? anyone? unsure.) take three mug-shots each, one with the camera above eye-level, one with the camera at eye-level, and one with the camera below eye-level, the attractiveness rating will likely decline in that order. Not because of cleavage (where applicable), but because photos taken from above eye-level make everyone’s face look thinner. I’ve always assumed that’s precisely why the myspace cliche came into existence in the first place. These people aren’t trying to be specifically *coy* — they’re holding a camera or phone in front of themselves and looking at the screen as they position their face and the lens. They then independently each determined that holding the camera higher or tilting their faces downwards made them look more attractive (vis-a-vis cultural norms, etc., of course).
(Chances are our difference in assumptions about the *reason* for the “myspace shot” doesn’t affect the interpretation of the data because you’ve normalized for attractiveness rating already.)
Great insight into vanity….Is that what makes a woman or man beautiful?
Statistics! Its surprising to me that you did all this complex stuff, but didn’t do any statistics. You could determine (with a simple ANOVA), for instance, which of the photo variables explain your results under which interactions. For instance, more than “abs are better than tuxedos” you could say “abs are better than tuxedos depending on if you are showing your face, your age, your gender, and your attractiveness.” Does showing you with an animal increase your odds if youre less attractive? Does that depend on age? This is pretty easily doable, in fact I could do it (if you could get me a date).
Also, as a homo, and a user of this site, I’m kinda disappointed you dont break more of your analysis down by sexual orientation, we need tips too!
very great conclusion, i studied data mining back in college so I pretty much understand the data you’re showing here such as clutter and everything else. well now i know that data mining can be applied in facebook.
HAha very nice, I know one myth, placing a decent but hot liking teen picture on profile really invite lots of friends.
Great breakdown of interesting data!