Two women appear on my screen. I click the one I prefer. Another pair appears. I choose again. The faces themselves are varied. I am mostly asked to rate young adult women, and there’s a visible mix of ethnicities, hairstyles, aesthetics and photographic styles: polished dating-app portraits alongside perfectly ordinary phone selfies. They looked, for the most part, like ordinary internet users.It has been a long time since I last swiped right on a stranger. I am in a relationship, and dating apps – I hope – are firmly out of bounds. But in the 14 years since Tinder launched, more than 350 million have logged on to look for love. Out of these, roughly 23 million people have paid for the privilege.
Now a new website, launched this summer, wants to extract even more from this swiping experience. Study of Us, created by the American sex researcher, former sex worker and controversial internet personality who goes by the alias Aella, invites users to choose between pairs of faces to discover their own “attractiveness” score.
The premise is simple. Upload your photograph and strangers will rate you in return. Accumulate enough “credits” by swiping and the site promises to tell you not only how attractive people find you, but what sorts of people are particularly keen on you. Rating 10 pairs of women earns one credit. There are also small rewards for quizzes and “guessing rounds” involving politics, net worth, dominance and “body count” (the number of people you’ve had sex with).
I chose the cheaper option. By the time I unlocked my final report, I had rated well over a thousand pairs of faces. I had to rate so many people that my thumbs started to ache; by the end, it felt as though I had judged a sea of strangers. I wouldn’t say it was an especially edifying sensation.
After several days of tapping, I finally accumulated the 300 credits required to unlock the grandly titled “Big Report”. The verdict was rather kinder than I had feared. Of 133 people who had seen my photograph, 62 per cent of women had chosen me, compared with 47 per cent of men.
I was unusually divisive: reactions to my photograph were more sharply split than reactions to 76 per cent of the photos on the site. In other words, this was not a difference between men and women; raters as a whole disagreed about my face more than they did about most.
Age was even more revealing. Only 40 per cent of women aged 18 to 24 picked me, rising to 63 per cent among 25-to-34-year-olds and 72 per cent among women aged 35 to 44. At 43, I decided to take this as a victory.
Study of Us also identifies your “fans”: people disproportionately likely to choose your photograph. An early readout described mine as mostly women, with a median age of 25, and said they tended to favour white, older, taller and more socially conservative-looking men. Aella thinks identifying the demographic for whom you particularly appeal is more useful than obsessing over a single beauty score.
During the days I spent swiping, I was asked to decide which of two people presented to me had slept with more people, who was richer, who was more politically conservative, who was more dominant. A lot of the time I was simply guessing, and guessing as quickly as possible, because the point was to rack up credits.
But after a while I began developing shortcuts. When trying to work out somebody’s net worth or sexual history, I increasingly found myself choosing the more conventionally attractive person. It felt as though my scores were improving.
There is at least some logic to this. Economists have long identified a “beauty premium” in the labour market: good-looking people can enjoy advantages in earnings and employment. Wealth itself can also leave traces in teeth, grooming, clothes and the surroundings in which a photograph is taken. Attractive people may likewise enjoy more sexual opportunities.
Yet, when Study of Us eventually totted up my guesses, I was only 52 per cent accurate on net worth and 51 per cent on body count: barely better than tossing a coin.
‘Men can become fixated on supposedly objective rules about what women want, even when those preferences are partly being exaggerated by competition between men themselves,’ writes Bloodworth (Photo: Teri Pengilley/The i Paper)Eventually the site began assembling what amounted to a statistical dossier on my desires. Apparently I leaned towards younger-looking and slimmer women. At one stage, it informed me that I was unusually attracted to narcissists; after several hundred more choices, I was apparently unusually likely to avoid them. My supposed preferences also extended to political outlook, kinkiness, dominance, mental illness and pornography consumption.
And yet, since the site launched, a sea of users have flocked to test out their own face. Tom, 31 from London, was one of them. “I was immediately interested in the website because it claimed to provide an actual, accurate, data-led answer to the question that I constantly ask myself: am I actually attractive?” he says. “Obviously my partner and my friends say I’m attractive, but there’s a niggling doubt there.”
Tom quickly became hooked on the site. “What I didn’t expect was how addictive it became – I initially convinced myself I ‘wasn’t taking it seriously’ and uploaded one hasty selfie. When the results came in, and it was only being picked by 60 per cent of users, the facade of ‘I’m not taking this seriously’ immediately wilted away, and I uploaded four more pictures and started frantically engaging with the site.”
This sits in stark contrast to dating apps – which, Tom believes, do the same thing, but in hidden, private algorithms. “Dating apps are just cynical enough to be wrapped up in inspirational marketing about exploration, adventure, finding your soulmate and living happily ever after.”
Online looksmaxxing culture is full of this desire for certainty: jaw angles, height, symmetry and “mate value”. Men can become fixated on supposedly objective rules about what women want, even when those preferences are partly being exaggerated by competition between men themselves.
This terminology, originating from Incel communities, has become an obsession in some darker spaces of the internet, with men going to extremes to improve their “sexual market value”. Leg lengthening surgery has become increasingly popular, while young men on TikTok seek out easy ways to achieve the perfect chiselled jaw (believed to be one of the laws of looksmaxxing).
Dr Anda Solea, who researches incel and looksmaxxing spaces, says the language of science is important. Calling something a score, or presenting it as a graph begins to look empirically proven.
Aella herself is relaxed about the looksmaxxing comparison. “I am pro-looksmaxxing,” she tells me. She has undergone cosmetic surgery and points out, reasonably enough, that going to the gym is itself a way of improving your appearance.
But she is less interested in telling users how to become universally desirable than in showing them how particular photographs are read. Most of us, she says, are simply ordinary-looking people who nonetheless fall in love, marry and live perfectly happy lives.
“I may not be the hottest person,” she says, describing the mentality she hopes users will adopt, “but there’s going to be somebody out there who thinks that I’m really hot.” There is something quite reassuring about this.
It seems there’s an enormous amount that we think we know from a face, not to mention the curious authority we grant a judgement once it has been converted into a percentage. A face can contain many clues. The trouble begins when we mistake those clues for something actually insightful.
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