The 4 Big Myths of Profile Pictures

January 20th, 2010 by Christian Rudder

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 about 50% more than 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
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.

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&#8212indeed, 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.

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.

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

  1. Jeremy says:

    It would be really interesting to see the age difference of people reaching out, as well. For instance, do younger men reach out to older women showing cleavage, and vice versa. Everyone is filtering for desired mates with what they choose to post in their profile, but I imagine that’s the subject of another post.

  2. Greg says:

    Love the blog as it intersects so many of my interests but I implore those who’re in charge, could you please restore the full rss feed?

  3. Abbie says:

    It frustrates me that you equate the star rating to an ‘attractiveness’ rating. I, for one, do not use it like that.

  4. bornyesterday says:

    Our data set was chosen at random from all users in big cities, with only one profile photograph, between the ages of 18 and 32How representative is this of the average OKC user? I’d be much more interested in the results if a person has more pictures, with a variety of different types (ie. one outdoor, one close-up, one boobshot, etc). How does profile content/completion affect the messaging rate for similar photographs?

  5. terrence says:

    This is such awesome stuff. Now if you’ll excuse me, I need to take a picture of myself staring off in the distance, not smiling, without a shirt covering my rippling abs.

  6. Neil says:

    It seems that you’re measuring messages received, not successful contacts. Maybe abs-baring or cleavage-showing works, but it gets you attention from the wrong kind of people? (And presumably the abs-barers and the cleavage-showers would find each others’ tasteless pics hot).

    I think people are a little more interested in what sort of picture leads to a successful contact (i.e. one where the contactee writes back).

  7. Nathan says:

    You tagged 7,000 pictures by hand, just to produce this blog post? No wonder you guys don’t make any money. ;)

    It’s fascinating reading though. Please keep it up!

  8. Maria Parenteau says:

    That’s a very nice article. I love my picture, but knowing all this now gave me a good insight in why people wants to follow me all over the place. Thanks for taking your time to
    write this, well done.

  9. Nick says:

    It is not big surprise that the “MySpace” shot does so well. It is essentially an old Portrait Photography trick. When working as a studio photographer I was trained to use it, and in turn shot most girls from a step ladder. It works well because it forces the girl to look up which thins out the face and brings their pupils up which makes them look more innocent. Thin and innocent are 2 qualities that the majority of men are after. In addition, it allows the rest of the body to go out of focus which helps hide the waistline, which may or may not be as thin as one would hope. This of course brings the breasts shoulders and head to the foreground of the photo, and becomes the focus. Cleavage becomes a non issue at this point since most girls will look to be fairly endowed when the rest of their body is out of frame or out of focus. In summary this type of shot makes you look thin, innocent, busty, and tempts you to find out how the rest looks. Bonus points go to the girls who stand at a 45degree angle to the camera, another trick for making girls look thin.

    Certainly interesting to see this all be proven true in the data. Nice job.

  10. bornyesterday says:

    @Nathan – actually, they set up a section of OKC where they showed users the various pictures and asked them to determine if the picture had certain characteristics (facing the camera/downward angle/outdoors/etc)

  11. Cat says:

    Purely as an experiment, I really want to set up a profile using all of the info outlined by the data you collect.

  12. Anon says:

    It might be nice to do some sort of variance analysis (or something a little more sophisticated than comparison of averages), to make sure these conclusions are actually meaningful.

    Still, interesting stuff.

  13. Jemaleddin says:

    @Neil – then you should continue to read the article… They cover that.

    I’m curious to see the graph of guys you chose, given the distribution of attractive men as determined by OKC users.*

    * My theory about that is that you’re seeing the far right extreme of a bell curve. Most baseball players are below average because you’re limiting your selection to the truly great – you expect a bell curve, but what you get looks like a power law curve. In the same way, men are just naturally VERY attractive. I blame eons of genetic pressure and cite examples from the animal kingdom.

  14. Reddi says:

    Very interesting read!

  15. heroofthebeach says:

    For what it’s worth, I am much more likely to rate someone lower if they only have one photo. When that happens, I tend not to trust the photo and assume that this is their one good shot. The importance of the rest of their profile is heightened and I become overall harder to impress.

    That said, I actually don’t often see people who have just one photo. I don’t dispute your conclusions, but I wonder how these things affect the data set.

  16. Ethe says:

    Every time I get bored with OKcupid and threaten to leave/check out some other personal site, a post like this reminds me why I originally signed up here; good ol supercrunching. The data mining here is by far the most fascinating thing OKcupid has going on for it.

  17. Jason says:

    I’m curious if you find the same results for men looking for men?

  18. Tom says:

    “if you’re a guy with a nice body, it’s actually better to take off your shirt than to leave it on”

    …only if you want to attract the type of vapid women who chose their men based on their six packs, of course

  19. Cynical_Nerd says:

    I’m not sure I really fit into those categories with my photos but they seem to work well enough.

  20. Diacritic says:

    What you’re telling me is that I need to take up scuba diving.

    Hey, what counts as “an attempt” to meet someone? Just sending a message? Seems like that would be a source of significant error.

  21. Jacob says:

    The data-mining is superb; it’s the reason I signed up in the first place!

    For me, I think the takeaways are this: I’m okay not showing off my abs (at my age, it’s not THAT much more successful, and I’ll tend to attract the male equivalent of “hey, nice rack”), and that I need to be looking away from the camera and not smiling in order to display my true manly strength. Eye contact is for the ladies.

  22. Zare says:

    Great report as always!

    I think “change a message leads to an actual conversation” needs to be normalized by the number of messages received. One would expect the number of conversations someone starts to be inversely related to the number of messages they receive. The more choice they have, the more selective they can choose to be. The less time they have for individual messages.

    So you need to find a way to tease out the effect of popularity.

  23. m says:

    These blog posts can be fun and this one in particular makes me wish I could see my average star rating. Then perhaps I could change my images to follow this guide and see if I get a shift upwards in my star rating as well as message responses.

  24. DouglasNatural says:

    Truly excellent and extremely helpful blog post!! THANK YOU GREATLY for your analysis!

  25. Jason says:

    Fascinating post (as always). Any chance of making the data available so we can play with it? Thanks either way…

  26. opele says:

    Actually, bornyesterday, I’ve found the one photo thing to be incredibly (and disappointingly) representative of the average user (if I’m randomly browsing). Of course I’m not looking for the average user and so the techniques mentioned to get a high message turnout are useless to me.

  27. Brian Armstrong says:

    These posts are great guys! Both helpful, controversial, and funny – I think you’ve found the right recipe for a company blog – I’m wondering now how I can apply it to my own business. Keep up the great work!

  28. Sing_le says:

    The abolition of specific “looks” and “personality” ratings degraded the ability to identify the “most attractive” users (as well as prompting me to stop issuing “star ratings” entirely).However,rather than lopping off the high and low ends,how about using that as a dimension in determining if the ratings convey a difference in responses?

  29. nephari says:

    Christian — I think you have the most interesting data mining job I’ve ever encountered.

  30. Chris Taylor says:

    interesting read Thanks

  31. Daniel says:

    Leaving aside the explanations for the effectiveness of the MySpace Shot pointed out by Nick, when you’re taking pictures of yourself for the purposes of putting them on an online profile, you can keep taking pictures until you get one you think flatters you. When you’re going through existing pictures looking for a flattering shot, you do not have this option.

  32. Kenpar says:

    Another nice one by the OkCupid crew! This might in the top 5 of the best blogs you guys have made. But, it didn’t tell me a lot I didn’t know already, just like the other blogs haha. I was surprised at the data of older women showing cleavage thought. I also saw the picture of AcuteTriangle on the front and was hoping to see what you thought of her profile. You can’t see her face at all! But, I would like to see how she actually looks, haha.

    Anyway, keep up the good work. This is one of the few things that makes this site worth it. Your forums don’t though, haha. But, the forums can be entertaining.

  33. Venkat says:

    Fascinating. If you haven’t already, I strongly recommend you read Matt Ridley’s “Red Queen” (on evolutionary sexual selection theory) to look for more good analytics questions. I just finished reading it and it’s provoked a lot of interesting trains of thought for me.

  34. 7infinity says:

    To me this analysis leaves two blaring questions:
    1) Does the shirtless effect disappear the way the cleavage effect does when you look at conversations instead of responses?

    2) I know you guys are smart enough to run a regression and control for attractiveness. That would help to answer the question of whether the photo types are simply self-selected (hotter men/women choose Myspace shots and shirtless/cleavage shots). Why didn’t you? Or did you do it and just not tell us?

    Overall, excellent work, folks. You should present at the next CHI.

  35. Thane says:

    Great post, as always.

    Regarding the reduced benefits of shirtlessness in men as they age. You question if this is a body issue, or an issue more about women’s desires. Wouldn’t it be ‘simple’ enough to judge that based on the ages of the women who reply?

  36. Elen says:

    I’m a sucker for a guy with a great smile, and am very unlikely to message a man who doesn’t have at least one shot that shows it off. I don’t know why other women seem drawn to the ‘myseterious’ look. Keep grinning, guys!

  37. mojaam says:

    Wow, these data mining things you do is always so interesting and fun to read. Keep it up. Heck I would love to have a job even if it’s as tedious as tagging for things like this.

  38. kutaly says:

    My main pic is shirtless, flirting away from the camera and with an animal
    Shouldn’t I be overrun by women by now?

    Oh well,
    I expect an increase in grannies cleavage pictures coming after this post

  39. NemoNYC says:

    Lots of fun reading this.

    BTW, in the age vs num of contacts, I’m assuming that the number of internet users is controlled for?
    If there are much more younger contacters on the website then you’ll see the number of contacts decrease as the num of ‘young’ attributes (eg cleavage) decreases. hum, very likely since the subjects studied are young.

    What about plotting share as the y?

    Hum, a simple different perspective will make this analysis profitable: what about list out the myths by the demo that each attributes should target and make that a paid result. To understand what pictures attract age 30-40 year old male engineers, etc. I guess you can even sell the result to match.com.

  40. supermariobrosb4hos says:

    “It frustrates me that you equate the star rating to an ‘attractiveness’ rating. I, for one, do not use it like that.”

    I don’t think they do. I think they explained in a previous post about how it has to do with clicks on the images themselves or something. I wish they would show us our own attractiveness rating for each picture so we could figure this stuff out on our own. Are my pictures the best possible representation of me? I have no idea. Even better, are they attractive to people I’m attracted to? If they’re only attractive to guidettes, I should change them.

    Of course, correlation does not imply causation. Maybe the guys who have classy black-and-white staring-off-into-the-distance photos just have more interesting profiles/personalities?

    Also, just because someone has a conversation doesn’t necessarily make it a “success”. Some people meet (IRL style) after 3 messages, while others write back and forth dozens of messages and never go any farther than online friendship.

    I’ve done my own tests by posting dozens of pictures to hotornot.com, scoring anywhere from 2.8 to 8.7, and posted the best to OkC, but it’s hard for me to tell when I look good and when I don’t.

    I love this blog. This stuff is great. There are so many other trends you could look at, though. Post more often!

  41. Your Lotharia says:

    I’m thrilled that you’ve removed the requirement to show your face in the picture. My experience before I knew about that rule supports your data. I got lots of hits from a cleavage picture without my face, with the bonus that pretty much all of them liked my body type once they got my full pics privately. When the pic was removed for not having a face in it, my correspondence went down.

    Aside from the mystery factor, some of us choose to keep our private lives private so don’t want colleagues and family stumbling across our faces on the site. Thanks for giving us the option to upload a photo we’re comfortable having the whole world see.

  42. Fizz says:

    Okay, so I’d get more messages if I showed cleavage … but how many of those messages would be from sleazeballs who don’t even click on my profile before trying to get me to sleep with them? Call me when you figure out mathematically how to get messages from people who aren’t douches.

  43. ConsumedConsumer says:

    VERY informative, well done!

  44. Cercolamore says:

    Personally, I *hate* the pictures of shirtless guys. Hate, hate, hate them. They always strike me as so self-absorbed and conceited, and from reading a great many profiles of shirtless guys, I have to say my perceptions are usually confirmed. Then again, I’m more interested in a guy’s personality, anyway.
    I agree that travel photos and the like are more interesting, though :)

  45. Roberto says:

    The Myspace Shot one was actually quite interesting. Did you control for age? I would think that younger people are more likely to take that kind of photo and that people are more likely to contact younger (read more attractive) people.

  46. MikeInTx says:

    I’m curious to know whether the same myths are debunked for gays as well. Do you have enough of a sample set to pull meaningful data?

    I’m fascinated by the cruisier dating sites out there (but am certain I’ll never meet “Mr. Right” through one of them). That’s why I’ve got a profile on OKCupid (plus it’s free!). At the same time, I’m wondering if the “wholesomeness” of my profile here may be holding me back, given the data above…

    For kicks I’ve just changed my profile pic to one from a recent poker game. ;-)

  47. A guy says:

    You guys should have tested another factor:

    The pics where the main user is shown with one other person of the opposite sex who isn’t an obvious car import model or something:
    -where the opposite sex person’s face is shown
    -where the opposite sex person is cropped out
    -where the opposite sex person is blacked out

  48. Peter says:

    Hmm, interesting. Ok, no more looking at camera for me. Also find a way of showing off bod.

    As for myspace pics; yes, they do get guys. However, I hate them because they are more often than not a way to hide a girl’s pudge and show her boobs. However they aren’t a deal breaker unless there’s no other pictures to prove that the girl’s body isn’t hideous.

  49. Bri says:

    I second the request for data based on men interested in men. It would be interesting to compare. It’s hard to extrapolate for us based on these results.

  50. Tym says:

    I once wrote a blog titled “Your Travel Photo Doesn’t Make You Sexy”. I’m glad to see it’s true! The rest of this is pretty common sense, and typical, because myths are usually started by those that can’t face reality. I’m very disappointed that you guys left out data regarding the interactions of homosexuals for this post, though. Way to sell out. :(