Online dating is a superficial place: your photos are everything. But sometimes no matter how much time and effort someone spends fine-tuning their profile pictures with the perfect mix of professional and casual-but-adventurous pics, there’s an uncomfortable truth: being good-looking is a big advantage on apps like Tinder and Bumble – and that’s especially important for men due to how harshly women rate them.
But just how big is the advantage of physical beauty? OkCupid gathered as much data as they could to answer this question back in 2009, and reported their findings in a now-deleted blog post that has been recovered by Wingman. The dating site analyzed how physical beauty affected both the messages users received unprompted and how successful their outgoing messages were.
To illustrate the exact spectrum of looks they discussed and to put some human faces on their analysis, OKCupid introduced a few photos of real users. Here are two women they identified as being near the top of their range of physical attractiveness
And here are two rated in the middle:
As for photos at the bottom of the curve, OKCupid noted that it didn’t feel right to ask someone, “Can I use you to illustrate the concept of ugliness on my blog?” so readers were left to extrapolate.
The users featured above agreed to let OKCupid post their pictures, so they humorously asked readers not to make them regret it. Interestingly, OKCupid had to write to about a dozen beautiful female users before anyone even got back to them—a case of life imitating blog!
Attractiveness is far from a universal concept, but OKCupid suggested keeping these examples in mind as they guided users through the data.
The Spectrum of Attractiveness
OKCupid began with a simple line chart to present their findings. The information presented was not normalized because, as OKCupid observed, it’s interesting how men and women evaluate looks differently.
The chart depicted how men rated women on a scale from 0 to 5. The curve was symmetric and surprisingly charitable: a woman was as likely to be considered extremely ugly as extremely beautiful, with the majority of women rated around “medium.” The chart appeared normalized, despite being the unfiltered opinions of male users.
OKCupid was quite surprised by the perfectly rational symmetry of this bell-curve, and commended male users for their fairness and realism.
Next, OKCupid superimposed the distribution of actual messages guys sent:
When it came down to choosing whom to message, men overwhelmingly chose the very pretty ones. For instance, a user like roomtodance received nearly five times as many messages as a typical woman and 28 times as many messages as a woman at the low end of the curve. Site-wide, two-thirds of male messages went to the best-looking third of women. Essentially, guys were competing 2-for-1 for the absolute best-rated females, while plenty of potentially charming, even cute, girls went unwritten.
OKCupid humorously referred to this phenomenon as "male pattern madness."
The Female Perspective
The female equivalent of the above chart revealed a different bias:
The gray line showed that women rated an incredible 80% of guys as worse-looking than medium—a very harsh assessment. However, when it came to actual messaging, women shifted their expectations only slightly ahead of the curve, a healthier pattern than men’s pursuit of the all-but-unattainable. Despite the skewed ratings, the two curves together suggested some strange possibilities for the female thought process, the most salient being that the average-looking woman had convinced herself that the vast majority of males weren’t good enough for her, but she then went right out and messaged them anyway. To illustrate that women were operating on a very different scale, OKCupid shared just a few of the many guys they, in the office, considered totally decent-looking, but that women had rated, in their occult way, as significantly less attractive than so-called “medium”:
Females of OKCupid, the site founders (Chris Coyne, Christian Rudder, Sam Yagan, and Max Krohn) had a message: ouch! It seemed that it was women, not men, who had unrealistic standards for the “average” member of the opposite sex.
Finally, OKCupid combined the two charts to emphasize just how much fuller the inboxes of good-looking people got. They scaled the graph to show multiples of messages sent to the lowest-rated people. For instance, the most attractive guys received 11 times the messages the lowest-rated did, while the medium-rated received about four times as many.
This graph dramatically illustrated how much more important a woman’s looks were than a guy’s in the online dating world.
Attractiveness and Reply Rates
OKCupid then looked at how the attractiveness of both senders and recipients affected reply rates, not just the number of messages sent.
As expected, more attractive people received more replies. And since they received so many more messages than everyone else, they wrote back much less frequently. OKCupid plotted the data for female senders in evenly spaced “attractiveness groups.”
They then presented the corresponding data for male senders.
An interesting pattern emerged: when the best-looking men wrote to the worst-looking women, their message success rate took a significant hit. While one might chalk this up to hunky spammers, OKCupid controlled for that possibility. The data suggested it might be some kind of self-confidence issue.
As before, OKCupid consolidated the line charts to show just how attractiveness impacted the likelihood of getting a response.
Moving Forward
This analysis was the preamble to a larger discussion about “what makes a good profile?” OKCupid spent a lot of time on OkTrends looking at messages, and since a user’s profile is another important place they express themselves, it deserved the same level of scrutiny.
OKCupid wanted to address physical attractiveness right at the start because it’s obviously a huge factor in how successful a profile is. In upcoming posts in the series, they planned to control for attractiveness, allowing them to deliver real and useful advice for all the non-models out there.
They would explore, among other things: what makes a good picture (is it taken outside? inside? full-body? headshot? with a pet snake?), what kinds of self-presentation would get the most messages (jokey? flirty? all business?), and how much profile information is too much. We’ll recover all of those blog posts here on Wingman.
This is part of a series of blog posts that analyzes OkCupid's online-dating statistics. You can find the others here: