Monday 18 January 2010

[Web] BeautifulPeople.com :: The Ugly Face of Online Dating


‘You find a lot of the other websites, you know, there’s a lot of - to put it nicely - riff-raff. With Beautiful People, I mean, there’s - they’re just, you know, sort of, more people like us.’

- Ashley Peaulac, Beautiful Person


There is something distinctly unsavoury about BeautifulPeople.com, and I swear this is not just sour grapes.

I first heard about ‘The sexiest website in the world today’ a week or so ago after they'd apparently kicked out 5,000 fatties after they'd beefed up over Christmas. I wondered if it could possibly be true. So I went along to the site.

Sure enough, it really is a club where only the beautiful may gain admission. Now, like Groucho Marx, and pretty much anyone else with a healthy streak of self-loathing, I find myself automatically suspicious of any club that will have me as a member. At least to a certain extent. However, there is also the flipside to consider, for like many practised self-loathers, I am also, in part, enormously conceited, and the idea of being excluded from a club, from any club – especially on the grounds of something so superficial and arbitrary as my outward appearance – really grates my Johnson. So what I did, I stole the face of a hunky Turkish footballer and set up a fake account. Boom! Eat that, my pretties!

And once I was in, I have to say, I was disappointed. To be fair, there are an awful lot of loltards everywhere on the internet these days, and if you go to any live chat forum on pretty much any dating site, there will be a scarily high number of these excitable fools communicating primarily in punctuation marks. Beautiful People, however, is crawling with the fuckers. In retrospect, I should really have left immediately, but I was determined to give it a fair crack of the whip, so I hung around, an ugly man in a sexy mask, and I made notes.

For the rest of this remarkable review, Stan recommends you go here and purchase a copy of The Little Book of Shame. Not only does it contain the article you're currently reading, it also contains around 50 others, and all for the incredible price of whatever price it happens to be at the moment. You lucky thing you.

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23 comments:

Katja said...

Do you know about asmallworld.net? I'll probably be blackballed for even mentioning it, but a more vacuous set of cnuts I've rarely seen. It's Eurotrashers with too much money; the kind of people that I went to school with and was very glad to leave behind. If you can get yourself an invitation I'd love to hear what you think of it ...

Anonymous said...

a) Damn... I should watch Canada AM more often.

2) Damn... you have a very sexy voice.

C) Oh yes... topic of post. Right. When I find out that someone I've been corresponding with online is conventionally attractive, it throws me right off. I just don't know what to do with someone who isn't, at the least, quirky looking.

Anonymous said...

As a self-confessed ugly guy have you never met someone who is not beautiful in the traditional sense but the more you know her the more beautiful she becomes?

Anyone who signs up to an online dating sight is subjecting themselves to the vetting process - and stage 1 is always about aesthetics. And you need more than just thick skin to survive that unscathed.

Beautifulpeople sounds vacuous and base, but probably reflects what the vast majority of people want.

I hope you find your Maria. And may she be beautiful to you.

Anonymous said...

I love your exotic similes! They always make me laugh.

Maria in Oregon

grahampuk said...

Love your blogs. For years I have been using IMO rather than the obsequious IMHO. I'm now really tempted to start using IMNMH,YFL-WO but fear it may be misunderstood.

Helen said...

"trying to get to know people is like trying to make a paper swan out of a baked potato. Whilst blindfolded. And wearing an oven glove."

Brilliant. Just brilliant.

Beleaguered Squirrel said...

Now I'm annoyed because I failed the intelligentpeople IQ testm twice. And I want to know what the answers were! And now I need to resist wasting the rest of the day doing it over and over with a different email address each time until I get the correct damn answers.

Anonymous said...

Everyone knows beautiful people shag more! Like rabbits, apparently.

CindyCB said...

I love the fact that on the front page, at the bottom is says "Too ugly to sign up? Click here to browse BeautifulPeople as guest".

As guest?

Beautiful maybe,
stupid definitely.

truelateral said...

And now I'm annoyed because I failed the Intelligent People test once and am too scared to try again. Ach, I probably don't want to join a community of pattern matching champions anyway. They probably wear ugly jumpers.

Also, Katja, thank you for mentioning asmallworld. If you hadn't, I'd never have seen the picture of Patrick Liotard-Vogt. The stalkery starts now.

Anonymous said...

LOL, couldn't agree more!!!

I joined that site yonks ago, because it sounded very exclusive and I wanted to see if I could get in. And upon getting accepted with a genuine recent photo, I was as ridiculously happy as if I'd actually achieved something.

Which goes to prove that, cynical or not, their Nazi-tastic door policy certainly works.

I swear to God, you could make a cow's arse a desirable venue if you barred 95% of applicants from going in on the grounds that they weren't pretty enough.

Once inside the inner sanctum, I immediately realised pretty much what you did. It's a horrible site that's a bugger to use, and it seems to be full of bright orange people with Tippex-coloured teeth who make Jordan and Alex Reid look like particularly erudite members of the Bloomsbury set.

And there are far, far, far too many photos of smirking bare-chested men who appear to be coated in Ronseal.

Far from being an exclusive party that lesser mortals weren't invited to, I quickly came to think of it as a convenient corral for the vain, the dim and the scarily orange - handily preventing normal people from ever having to go out with them.

When I was a member (a year or so back) they had occasional parties for their members, where you could all meet up in real life. But for some strange reason, I never really wanted to go - wonder why
:-)

Liliai said...

I will be damn sure to steer clear of beautifulpeople.com. Lol =]

Anonymous said...

I absolutely love the site.

Granted, the concept of BeautifulPeople.com is somewhat shallow, but as a dating service it works brilliantly.

And yes, it has some technical bugs, but the site is continuously updated and improved.

On the mainstream dating sites I feel like contacting 1-2% of the profiles I come across. On BeautifulPeople I feel like contacting about half the profiles!

There are so many ordinary sites out there - I think that it is liberating that the Internet has room for this type of niche community that caters to a narrow group of people who are not afraid to admit that looks is an important factor when they search for a potential partner.

BeautifulPeople member
(since Oct 2009)

Joanna Cake said...

Sounds quite horrible. I cant imagine that a date with anyone who considers themself a 'beautiful person' would be more than an opportunity to listen to some egotistical git talking about themselves and looking down their nose at everyone around them. Just nasty!

La Bête said...

Hello, Katja. Yeah, I had heard about that before. It sounds ghastly.

Thanks, Marianne. It’s a thin line though, between quirky and freakish.

Hello, Anon. Yes, I believe I have. And thanks.

Thanks, Maria.

Use it, Gpuk. I insist.

Helen, you are too kind.

BS, a friend of mine saw your comment and went and tried himself. Passed first time. Annoying eh?

Maybe, Anon, but they don’t have the imagination to really enjoy it.

Oh, Cindy. Isn’t that just a typo though? Beautiful people have sausage fingers too you know. Be fair.

TL, yeah, it’s bollocks. I went in with my clever friend’s password and it’s even more dead than the beautiful one. By the way, you’re not really saying you fancy that leotard guy, are you?

Juliette! But… you’re beautiful! I’m thinking of starting a Bloomsbury Set. Do you want in?

Right you are, Abi.

Hello, BeautifulPeople member. Thanks for dropping by. I’m glad you like the site. You really feel like contacting half the people on there? That’s amazing to me. But I’m very happy for you.

Hello, Ms Cake. Well, quite.

Anonymous said...

well i have to tell you i have tried both bueatifulpeople and asmallworld... although i must add none of them claim to be "datingsites" but more of a facebook for the rich and glam.

I found a dating site called http://www.singlehotandloaded.co.uk and although there is still some work needed on the platform the members are wicked!

La Bête said...

Anon, BeautifulPeople certainly does claim to be a website. Greg Hodge said this to me: 'The primary focus of BeautifulPeople.com is for people who want to date.' See?

www.singlehotandloaded.co.uk looks pretty horrible too. Let's face it. All dating sites are absolutely ghastly. Bloody internet.

janetyjanet said...

yikes - it all sounds incredibly scary and a tad depressing, and I will now cringe ever so slightly as I realise I sound just like my mum and ask whether people still go out and join clubs or get hobbies to meet people?!

Still, my chums C&C met via a dating site and are one of those blissfully happy married with 2 children success stories you hear about so nil carborundum...!

Catherine Rowan Jones said...

It's not just BeautifulPeople, I think it's dating websites full stop. I joined the Grauniad site in Nov 2008. Had a few nice messages & chats based on my profile ... it all stopped when I posted a couple of photos. Not a peep in over a year. It's a visual medium and my face don't fit *shrug*

PS: I've commented before but am now brave enough to use my name.

Anonymous said...

Hi Bête. :D
I've been reading you a bit now and then, but this is the first time I comment.

I was surprised to see you didn't get into the the "clever-people's site", as it was sufficient to have an IQ in the top 15% of the population, and as I would have assumed that you did. I'm in the highest[1]% myself - I'm just an anonymous voice here, so I can tell - and you have always come across to me as clearly intelligent.

There are different sorts of intelligence you know, and even if you don't have what it takes to get top scores on IQ-tests, it's still clear as daylight from your blog that you're intelligent and gifted in other ways.

(For example, you could probably correct some minor language errors I've just committed, or at least suggest better formulations. :D
I take that with a smiley though, as English is not my first language :) And a bit more serious, wit may not register on IQ-tests, but it still clearly depends on intelligence.

"IQ" said...

(continuation)
Or maybe you say "connected with" intelligence? In any case, as far as I'm concerned you may delete both this and the previous comment.

"IQ" said...

Hi again!
Sorry about that thing I just sent!
The one that begun with "(continuation)".
Please just delete it, together with this one.
Thanks! :D

Dating said...

I love your exotic similes! They always make me laugh!!! :)))