The dating website OKCupid, in a now-deleted blog post from 2010, took a data-driven look into the myths surrounding dating-profile pictures. The site shared the results of analyzing over 7,000 photographs from their users. They focused on three primary aspects:
- 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?
By examining the wide variety of ways users chose to represent themselves, OKCupid discovered that much of the collective wisdom about profile pictures was wrong. For those interested, OKCupid explained their measurement process and how they collected their data at the end of the post. All their bar charts were zeroed on the average picture. Now, onto the data.
MYTH 1: It’s Better to Smile
One of the first things OKCupid noticed when diving into their pool of photos was 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.
You’re always told to look happy and make eye contact in social situations, but at least for online dating photos, that’s not optimal advice. For women, a smile isn’t strictly better; they actually get the most messages by flirting directly into the camera.
Interestingly, 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.
For men, photos are most effective when they look away from the camera and don’t smile.
Perhaps women want a little mystery. What could he be looking at? It’s noteworthy that while making flirty eye contact is relatively okay for men, flirting away from the camera is the worst thing they can do as well.
MYTH 2: The “MySpace Angle” Is Bad News
The "MySpace angle" is a 2000s-era term for holding your camera above your head and being giving a coy expression. It was a widely maligned selfie pose back in the day.
OKCupid initially thought these pictures were lame, and the prospect of producing hard data on just how lame got them excited. But they were wrong.
In terms of getting new messages, the MySpace shot was the single most effective photo type for women. OKCupid initially 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 the shot in the first place—so they excluded all cleavage-showing shots from the pool and ran the numbers again. No change: it was 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” had 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 OKCupid’s office recently, and when they mentioned they were researching user photos, the first thing she said was, “please tell me people hate it when guys show off their abs.” OKCupid hadn’t finished running the numbers yet, so they confidently reassured her that people did. The data contradicted them.
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, OKCupid couldn’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. They wouldn’t suggest that a Fitzgerald or a Dave Eggers limit his profile to 100 words, 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, OKCupid 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 woman 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 much closer to the average.
Because of the restricted data set for this post, OKCupid could only make confident claims for 19 to 31-year-olds, but they strongly suspected that this downward trend continues with age. In the future, perhaps they could 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 treating 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, OKCupid thought they 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 one less message a month than the equivalent 18-year-old; an older woman not showing off gets four messages less, a large relative fall-off in popularity. The older the woman, the more relatively successful she is at showing off her body.
OKCupid found this anti-aging trend surprising. When they looked further into the data, they saw that as women get older, they are more hesitant to emphasize their bodies, despite it 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 the cleavage discussion, OKCupid assessed the kind of messages cleavage-showers were getting. A message like “Hey nice rack” isn’t really going to lead anywhere and isn’t very valuable to the recipient. OKCupid looked a level deeper and analyzed what resulted from the incoming contacts. Did the messages go unanswered? Did they turn into legitimate conversations? They didn’t go through anyone’s inbox to do this; they mathematically modeled a “conversation” based on the number of messages back and forth. And they discovered the following:
This chart gives excellent insight into why the subject of this picture:
gets many more meaningful messages than 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
OKCupid used to think that the one iron-clad rule of Internet dating photos was to at least show your face. In fact, they used to give this very advice on OKCupid’s own photo upload page:
That page reads differently now because they found that all other things being equal, whether you show your face really doesn’t affect your messages at all.
When these results first came back, OKCupid didn’t believe it. They installed all kinds of sophisticated photo analysis software libraries, ran scripts to measure the percentage of face in each photo, and generated diabolically meaningless scatter plots:
But the facts were stubborn: your face doesn’t necessarily matter. In fact, not showing your face can actually be a positive, as long as you substitute 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.