Beautiful People: An Investigation (and most probably a foray into a deep, hidden vanity imbedded within me...)

So the other day I was in a doctor's waiting room flicking through the dog-eared pile of magazines lumped on a corner table, next to the dark blue sink-when-you-sit-down cushioned benches. I think it was a Cosmopolitan I picked up, I can't even remember who was on the cover. But between the pages of ads for beauty products that don't work and reality television interviews, an 'expose' on dating/social networking site 'with a difference' caught my eye.

Beautifulpeople.com is basically just another site, where people can be superficial and it seems perfectly fine. It's no different to those emo sites where little (and not so little) emo kids rate each other's looks. It holds no pretences about what it is. Although I'm not too sure how it really works though, because even though I wanted to 'investigate' the site, I wasn't willing to pay a subscription fee so I mainly got the demo version, which I can't imagine differs too greatly from the genuine thing.

You upload a bunch of photos and people ranked with scores between 0.00 and 10 rank your photo back. "Hotness" is evaluated through a 5-star system. You send the usual stupid things like winks, blinks, kisses and hugs.

That tidy little 3.76 you see in the green above my photo is my "beauty score". To keep the experiment an experiment, I monitored my 'success' over a 48 hour period of time. By the end though, even though I hadn't pushed the rating over the required 5 stars, I hadn't been kicked off the site or anything so exclusivity is a bit of a joke which is supposed to encourage you to keep using the site and maybe subscribe.

You can only rate members of the opposite sex and because they don't offer anything in terms of displaying your sexuality, I can only assume the people who are genuinely there to use the site are heterosexual.

The experience was silly to begin with but I can see why people who crave this type of attention for self-validation find it riveting. Your beauty score goes up and down, according to people who rank you. The highest I got was 4.41 and it only plummeted from there. But I don't really need random people telling me I'm beautiful or not. That said, I was checking the score like a mad man once I worked out how it operated. But once you realise what you're doing, it's a little embarrassing. Using this site only reinforced the stupidity of such a concept. But there are the funny profiles which use fake pictures. And I'm happy to say, I gave more than one cat lady and fat kid eating cake a 5-star rating to help fuck things up a bit. But it saddened me to know that there was a filtering system where you could let ONLY people with an above 5-star rating to 'check out your profile'.

I mean, really? Really??