Beautifulpeople.com

4th Dec 2009

Vic­to­ria Shires inves­ti­gates the lat­est image-obsessed website

‘BEAUTY is in the eye of the beholder…’ Since the world­wide launch of the con­tro­ver­sial new web­site beautifulpeople.com in Octo­ber, there can be even more peo­ple mak­ing that judg­ment. It is an exclu­sively ‘beau­ti­ful’ online com­mu­nity where the world’s finest-looking can com­mu­ni­cate and cre­ate per­sonal and pro­fes­sional rela­tion­ships with each other. The first com­mu­nity of its kind, it has become a global phe­nom­e­non, gain­ing suc­cess in 16 coun­tries after being founded in Den­mark in 2002.

To become a mem­ber of the élite club, appli­cants are judged on a pic­ture of them­selves by exist­ing ‘beau­ti­ful’ mem­bers of the oppo­site sex. Appli­cants are left antic­i­pat­ing the result for 48 hours before their beauty rat­ing is given the thumbs up…or most com­monly, down. The odds of actu­ally being accepted are very low, with only twenty per­cent of appli­cants mak­ing the grade. BeautifulPeople.com admit that the site ‘does not define beauty, it sim­ply gives an accu­rate rep­re­sen­ta­tion of what society’s idea of beauty is.’

The web­site has caused much con­tro­versy and dis­cus­sion. After all, who doesn’t have some­thing to say about a web­site that rates or hates peo­ple depend­ing on their looks? Appear­ing on var­i­ous Amer­i­can tele­vi­sion pro­grammes, Greg Hodge, the Man­ag­ing Direc­tor of the web­site, has had to defend beautifulpeople.com pro­fusely, and from all of the inter­views that I have seen he seems to have per­fected his rehearsed defence. Hodge describes the web­site as ‘an élite online club where every mem­ber works the door. Every­one wants to be with some­one that they are attracted to; Beautifulpeople.com is just a way of get­ting over the first hur­dle. Once you have been accepted as beau­ti­ful, there are var­i­ous tools to get across the char­ac­ter behind the beau­ti­ful exte­rior.’ Thus show­ing that per­son­al­ity comes sec­ond to looks.

He is aware that one of the main points that offend peo­ple is the rejec­tion of appli­cants who aren’t deemed ‘beau­ti­ful’ enough. This he jus­ti­fies by say­ing that ‘exclu­sion is preva­lent all through soci­ety. We see exclu­sion in foot­ball teams, Mensa and col­lege fra­ter­ni­ties. We have to exclude peo­ple to serve the pur­pose of the com­mu­nity.’ He sums up the web­site as ‘the best lit­tle black book in the world. If you think of the social net­work­ing mar­ket as a night­club, Beau­ti­fulPeo­ple is the VIP room.’ Extrav­a­gant, expen­sive and exclu­sive events are reg­u­larly put on for these fine-looking spec­i­mens of van­ity. They deserve it don’t they? After all, being beau­ti­ful is hard work…

When I first came across this web­site I laughed. I thought it was ridicu­lous that peo­ple would take it seri­ously and my curios­ity forced me to join up. I wasn’t wor­ried about get­ting swept up in some­thing so shal­low so didn’t think twice about it; I just wanted to see what it was like. I man­aged to get some friends to join up too and we set up a mini-investigation. Accord­ing to sta­tis­tics only one in five appli­cants are suc­cess­ful and so five of us made pro­files and eagerly awaited the response. I didn’t want to give too much infor­ma­tion away and so just sub­mit­ted a pic­ture from a recent night out and fake name. This is where I started to con­tra­dict myself. Although I thought I wouldn’t care about it, I found myself search­ing through my Face­book pro­file pic­tures for a rel­a­tively nice pic­ture; one where I thought I looked semi-beautiful.

I couldn’t under­stand why I sud­denly cared? I realise that I wanted to be deemed as beau­ti­ful and a fear of rejec­tion was start­ing to creep in. A friend who also applied found the site ‘unnerv­ingly addic­tive’ and it soon became her guilty plea­sure. She was sur­prised at how the exclu­sive mem­bers weren’t as ‘beau­ti­ful’ as you would expect and were actu­ally pretty average-looking. But who am I to judge who is beau­ti­ful? My male friends who signed up found it all quite funny and, even though they won’t admit it, they put a lot of effort into their profiles.

In a tele­vi­sion inter­view Robert Hintze, the founder of the web­site, sug­gested that ‘beauty’s a pack­age’ and that some mem­bers decided that men­tion­ing their assets (money, cars, jobs) in their pro­file may help them gain some votes. 
As we browsed the web­site, we noticed some absurd behav­iour. Not only is there a ‘Top 50′ sec­tion where the hottest of the (sup­pos­edly) hot are com­piled, but mem­bers rate each other’s pic­tures and send each other ‘hugs’.

I dis­cov­ered that this ‘beau­ti­ful’ world is actu­ally rather seedy and very flawed and it was con­cern­ing that my friends and I actu­ally began to get sucked in, want­ing to be accepted. As much as we laughed about it and said it was just a mean­ing­less com­pe­ti­tion, I soon began to care. Accord­ing to reg­u­lar sur­veys car­ried out on the web­site, the UK has the least beau­ti­ful peo­ple, along with Ger­many. Swedish men are the most likely to be accepted onto the site, as are Nor­we­gian and Brazil­ian women. This made me feel a bit bet­ter when I received an email a few days after join­ing say­ing: ‘Unfor­tu­nately your appli­ca­tion to the Beau­ti­fulPeo­ple net­work was not suc­cess­ful. The mem­bers of Beau­ti­fulPeo­ple did not find your pro­file attrac­tive enough.’ Great. I was how­ever, con­soled with the option to ‘apply again with a bet­ter photo or more inter­est­ing pro­file.’ And there is always the ‘Day Guest Pass’ for peo­ple who are ‘too ugly sign up.’