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

  1. Matthew

    ” anon

    Is there any particular reason you left out the confidence intervals?”

    I agree completely. Just like Mythbusters, you’re giving convincing arguments without mentioning if its significant or if you’re results could be explained naturally by variance.
    A very interesting read though.

  2. bob saget

    guess no one cares about homosexuals do they?

  3. Rainier Wolfcastle

    You didn’t mention one obvious (to me, at least) reason why both “with animal” and “doing something interesting” result in more contacts/conversations: the animal/activity are conversation starters. Or, in sales terms, “hooks”.

    Give me a choice between starting a convo with a person who shows only themselves, or starting a convo with someone who is hugging a dog or playing a guitar or holding a surfboard, and I’ll take the latter every time, because it gives me a conversation starter.

    Note that “with animal” and “doing something interesting” tend to be just about equal in all your stats. Those are different enough that one would expect more variation, but if you view them as easy hooks for conversation, the data makes sense.

  4. JJ

    interesting….

  5. wow. a dating site that actually makes use of it’s data/users. nice research. very informative.

  6. SamuelJohnson

    Fascinating! Of course nothing satisfied me more than the note that there is a strong correlation between conversation rates and what I will call, for lack of a better term “not being a stupid whore (i.e, drinking, the “myspace shot,” trying to display your physical attributes at the expense of or to the exclusion of your mental ones).” I think it provides an insight into the dual role that online social sites, and especially dating sites serve. On the one hand, they are genuine tools of social contact, where people go to find or maintain friendships and relationships. On the other hand, they are also a sort of non-pornographic venue for exhibitionism and voyeurism, a place where people can stare at photos of people with nice abs or breasts, without the sense shame that comes with looking at actual, depersonalized and professionally produced pornography/modeling photography.

    But, my very favorite thing is that your assumptions were all overturned. The reason for this is that your assumptions are based on the most obvious of all sampling biases. If you’re smart enough to do sociological analysis, then you are, by some definition an intelligent person. The majority of people on the internet are, along with the majority of people, morons. So, in your initial assumptions, you thought that the populace would feel the same way an intelligent person would about cheesy and uninventive “myspace shots” and ab shots. But of course, most people are too stupid to register these a shallow and embarrassingly derivative.

  7. JEN

    I don’t know whether I should agree with Samuel or not.
    But I do feel that there are other things that need to be considered before reading this article.
    One being that all the information is based off of one dating website which on its own “screams” to one kind of demographic, to which Samuel would call “the morons”.
    But lets say that the survey was conducted on a more maturely named and set up website (not ok cupid); you would expect that the response to certain images (myspace-pic) would alter in accordance (or at least you would hope so).

    And another thing to factor in is that people on dating sites are pretty much looking for sex or comfort/flirting and thats it
    and since many people incorrectly believe that there is a direct connection between their presentation and performance they look for the most attractive and the most fit. Which by itself should be a whole other paper all together

    What people should get from this study is that when we are looking to hook up, many of us won’t actually be looking at the individual. It’s also important to note that it’s not gender determinate either: women look at abs, men look at breasts, and I believe that has something more to do with our genetics

  8. I hate when you can’t see the face ugh.

  9. The absolute worst all time profile photos are where men post of picture of themselves with another woman. What is the point of that?

  10. Wow. Nice research!

    Funnily enough, 5 years ago I met someone through a dating website. My main photo was of me, looking at camera, slightly smiling, flirty face. I wore no makeup, pulled my hair back, and wore form-fitting clothes. For me, “form-fitting” means cleavage, because I have big boobs. So, throw cleavage in the mix, too. I stood in front of my bookshelves as a backdrop. I had a 2nd picture which was Myspace-style.

    He had a profile shot which showed him smoking, looking away from the camera in front of the Musée D’Orsay in Paris. His Myspace-style second pic showed his blue eyes and hinted at arm muscle.

    It must have worked – we’re getting married.

  11. As a photographer, this is invaluable information for me. Thanks.

    Beyond the “myspace shot”, did you consider measuring the success rate of snapshots versus professional (or professional-ish) photos? (”Professional” in this context meaning that there’s some obvious attempt at composition and lighting, not just on camera flash or glaring sunlight)

  12. Wow, this article was in-depth, and full of excellent info. I have always been interested in “profile pics” and what role they play. This was a great read!

  13. Wow fascinating data.

    Please share whenever you have more data to come!

  14. larry

    fascinating that we’re your little sociological experiment, makes me like you guys even more in an odd way. as for the “myspace shots,” as much as we all deplore them i suspect it might be a product of the early 20s and younger crowd who have grown up with the “myspace shot” and don’t find anything wrong with it. maybe you can do a breakdown on the age of those who post myspace shots and those who respond to them. personally i find them annoying, but i rock a dslr, so yeah i’m bit elitist about it.

  15. Patrick

    Fascinating. As a statistician, I am impressed with the quality of your measures, thoughtfulness of trimming the data, and selection of graphics and summary statistics to present. Ignore the comment about confidence limits — they would add unnecessary noise to the presentation and, unless some of the subgroups are tiny (which I hope you would have noted if they were), the sample size ensures that that the estimates have a precision appropriate to this context.
    It would be interesting to see how your results compare to academic research by psychologists into what constitutes visual attractiveness. There may not be much overlap since they are typically interested in beauty of the individual (not the photo, so there is a preference for standardizing poses) and you are interested how to make oneself most attractive in a single photo.

  16. EM

    I’m female, so my optimum profile picture would be me taking a flirty photo of myself with my breasts bared, outdoors while walking along a sand dune.

  17. Linden

    I believe that it’s important to consider confidence intervals, and some measures of statistical significance. Given the numbers involved, it’s very possible that some of these statistics can be explained by natural variation alone. Maybe next time graph confidence intervals as an overlay?

    Nonetheless, very interesting study!

  18. Emily

    I’m guessing with only about 7100 straight/bi folks to work with the number of non-hetero folks was probably around 100-150 people. If you further subdivide that into 100 gay men and 50 lesbians you’re left with sample sizes so small you can’t draw any meaningful conclusions about patterns. I don’t think they’re being discriminatory here, OKC is generally pretty cool about that; it’s a numbers game.

    Actually, looking again, their data doesn’t specifically say they only sampled straight folks, and their equations don’t specify gender either. “Women met per attempt” is explained as “(new incoming messages + replies to outgoing first contacts) / outgoing first contacts” which could be incoming messages and first contacts with guys as well as girls…

  19. Interesting post. I totally dig your blog posts about stats! Maybe do one for gay people also? Would be interesting to see :)

    Cheers,
    SML

  20. Justbeloving

    I show my cleavage… and here is my rationale. Men who initially respond to what they SEE are weeded out. Men who respond to what they READ are given opportunity. It tells me what this guy is really interested in. I’m sexy AND intelligent as evidenced by my profile. I’m going to keep it this way because it works for me, stats or no stats. But thanks, it was an interesting read.

  21. willow

    Well maybe im old fashioned , but with all your data, i still think that young and older women that have profile pics with their boobs popping out of their shirts or sitting there with only a bra on are looking for one of two things, attention, or sex. young guys that have profile pics with no shirt on are looking for attention and sex, older men with no shirt on in their profile pics are trying to relive their youth and are nuts enough to think a young girl , between 18-25 is going to find them sexy, sad but true.

  22. Very interesting study.

    I think in some cases there may be value in mapping psychological indicators to the different kinds of images and their success.

  23. Eric

    That “flirty face” is called DUCK FACE…check it out http://antiduckface.com/

  24. Dean Demuro

    so if a GUY was fucking a horse he would be doing something interesting and posing with an animal and that would be good.

    but if a GIRL was fucking a horse she would be doing something interesting and posing with an animal and it would only be half good.

    so sexist.

  25. foo

    interesting read!

    btw, lol: “What is he looking at? Slashdot?” :D

  26. IT'S STATISTICS TIME!

    So everybody, when you make a measurements (measure the same thing several times, like pulse rate, or measure different things, like age of MySpace users) you obviously get an average. But also, two such experiments may yield the same average but one may vary a lot: Consider a man at a steady job whose monthly earnings have drifted slowly from 2000$ to 3000$ over 10 years. Consider another one working more independently, who may earn 5000$ one month but nothing the next. Though they may make on average the same amount of money, and hence probably earn more or less the same in a year, clearly there are important differences between the two cases. This difference can be calculated quantitatively by taking the mean, and looking at how much the individual measurements drift from it. One application which concerns us is, if we know only the mean and variance of these two mens salaries, it would be reasonable to guess the first one will definitely be able to afford a 1500$ medical procedure the next month, whereas unreasonable to suppose the same for the second (disregarding any savings they might have).

    Not everything varies the same way. For example, if out of many differently priced products only two are (equally) popular, one for 20$ near the market minimum and one at 50$ near the maximum, the average money spent per consumer for the market will be close to the average of the two prices, since most people buy those. But unlike, say, weight of random people you meet, you won’t actually find many prices at or close to ~35$: They’ll be either 20$ or 50$ more often. However, it turns out that a lot of things do vary such that there are always fewer measurements that deviate greatly from the mean than there are measurements which are close to it. In fact, there is a very specific pattern to this, defined by a function called the Normal Curve, and these kinds of things are called statistical distributions. Since this is a very common distribution, it’s often reasonable to assume (when you don’t know any better) that your measurements will follow a normal curve.

    Now when you calculate variance the formal way (square root of the sum of the squares of the differences of each data point from the mean) that is called the standard error or standard deviation. When you see something like 350 +-15 ml on a juice bottle, that means the 350 is their mean and the 15 is their error, since they can’t and needn’t really make sure that every bottle of juice they make is *exactly* 350 ml and not one less or more. Add to that the function for the normal curve, you can figure out that there is exactly about 68% that any measurement from a normal distribution will not be farther away from the mean than the standard deviation. (Between 335-365 ml) This is 95% for two times the error (320-380 ml), and 99.7% for three errors. (305-395 ml) If you want, you can even calculate this for, say, 1.57 times the error from the function, or just find a table of already calculated values.

    Obviously, knowing this, we can say that in our first example there is only 60-70% chance that the second man can afford his vacation, while we essentially know for certain the first one will. Another thing we can say is this: With the juice bottles, if we find a bottle with not 350 but only 364 ml of juice, it’s probably not tampered with. But if you find a bottle with not 350 but 102 ml of juice, you know there’s something wrong because there’s like a million to one chance this was because the machinery at the factory had one of its usual messups. Because you can use it to figure out how sure you are, the “335-365″ (+- one error) is called the confidence interval. (This is all much oversimplified, see the wikipedia for more. Or something.)

    So when you say, “oh geez, I posted a picture of myself and 7 people a day messaged me, then I turned the picture upside down and 9 people a day messaged, I bet upside down pictures are better!”, you may be right or you may be wrong. It depends on the deviation. If you have months where you get no messages, and months where your inbox gets flooded, the deviation will be large and obviously, it doesn’t really matter which way your picture is. But if you get 7 messages a day, like clockwork, every month every year, then this is huge, like a die coming up 6 a thousand times in a row -it’s definitely loaded- as opposed to just three times -which, like, happens all the time, man-.

    See for example the context vs. age graph. They actually showed the data, and you can see there’s a lot of difference between those neat thick lines and the pale, squiggly actual data. And why are they lines, anyway? Looks like some logistic curve would fit much better, and yes that would impact the predictions they’ve made very much.

    Where are your confidence intervals, OKCupid? I don’t mean to be anal because the post is really interesting but really, without errors your measurements are no better than a tarot reading.

    Oh, and, Patrick from 8:16 AM: Errors are not important? The internet institute of statistics called, they want their fake diploma back.

  27. Barbara

    Have not been able to open “messages” today.

  28. Bruno Mokarzel

    And about photo with sunglasses?

  29. shaun

    I think maybe the effects of age have to do with the types of people online. At 19, showing your abs is advertisting what 19 year old girls want, sex. At 31, girls want a relationship, usually. Or, maybe less older people use the internet than younger people. Regardless, this is an interesting read

  30. amazing

    I don’t want to sound crude but depending on the kind of bait you put out there you are going to attract a certain type of fish. If you put your tits out there like a worm on a hook most fish will come over and check it out and maybe bite. But do you want a sunny? If you want to catch a bass a worm may work but a specific lure is better.

  31. amazing

    So i think comparing this study to the attractiveness study would be interesting

  32. Feleghi

    Who is that red-headed girl in the “Myspace Shots” section? I think I know her. A profile link would be lovely, thanks <3

  33. orlando

    Fun! But you don’t seem to have looked at the age of people responding to the photos. Given that FB probably has a young clientele, aren’t the results likely to be skewed in favour of what appeals to younger users. Hence the high success rate of ab shots and myspace photos. In other words, that kind of shot might be a great profile pic providing you want to attract people younger than 24, and repel people over 28…

  34. Not a big fan of the webcam pic… too amateur!

  35. Linz

    I have to say, I met my current boyfriend on this site and we are planning to move in together. My picture was of me posing with me dog outside and looking away. That photo seemed to get the most compliments. His was at a wedding with a drinking glass covering his face, but not his eyes. I did not have any “Myspace photos” on my page, and I still got several messages of the hook up variety. My profile had nothing of that type in it either. Seemed very odd for me to have spiked that type of attention.

    Either way, I appreciate the data and the site. It is free and easy and yes, there are people on here looking for sex, but it’s just about weeding those people out. There are plenty of people looking for an actual relationship, too.

  36. very interesting approach. Nice read.thanks

  37. Goodness. I didn’t realize this was about a dating site photo til half-way in. The advice is excellent for photography and social media profiles in general, and uhm, I am never going to flirt away from the camera, I promise I promise!!!! ;) )))) Thank you!!!

  38. JOe

    Don’t start a sentence with but! People are smart :-) creatures but usually in unpredictable ways!

  39. Anaxamenes

    So, I’ve decided you are just going to have to hire more lab assistants. I have to wait far too long for these to come out and we need to pick up the pace here.

    Also, don’t forget the homosexual like bob saget said. It really pisses people off when they are treated like people! That’s good enough of a reason for me!

  40. lena

    I think you’re leaving out a whole kind of picture that gives a profile depth and often adds something to talk about: the picture that is not a picture of yourself. I know that this is not allowed by the flagging policy, and it’s a shame. As a visual person and someone who cares about a companion’s visual imagination (it would be on par with wanting to date someone with good taste in music or literature), I get a little bored seeing only clear medium-to-close-up shots of people’s faces. It makes them seem dull and a little vain. A profile that mixed up clear shots of a person’s likeness ALONG WITH other kinds of images – somebody’s bookshelf, a particular place they care about, a weird thing they noticed and took a picture of – would add a lot to a profile, in my opinion. And since we’re allowed to upload 8 or 10 pictures, that should give plenty of room for both getting a sense of what a person looks like AND how they see the world. Please change your flagging policy.

  41. Buffet

    Only loser chics opt for little boys (< 35). Real women want a real man!