Update on Beautiful People.
A few years back, we blogged about a new online dating site called BeautifulPeople.com which touted itself as a destination for the world’s most attractive people to meet and date. We were particularly interested in the site’s plan to create a sperm bank for members.
Back then, the cynical us found the site to be pretty shallow. We wrote it off also as a hub for insecure people to go to get validation on their attractiveness by a bunch of strangers.
It is reminiscent of an old website and TV show, “Hot or Not”, which at the height of the reality TV boom represented the moral decay of society and popular culture.
When we reported on the website in 2012, it had gotten tons of press, but as the saying goes, “there is no such thing as ‘bad publicity.’
I was going through my StumbleUpon account and recalled our post about it so I thought I’d check in to see if the site is still up and running. Unsurprisingly, it is!
In order to do proper snooping, I had to sign up for an account (hope my husband or people I know don’t see my profile and go ballistic. lol)
But per the about page, BP claims being responsible for over 700 couples getting married. Its creators also assert that many of their site’s members have been ‘discovered’ and have secured lucrative positions in TV, modeling and acting careers.
As before, the self-proclaimed “elite online club,” allows existing members to vote up the attractiveness of applicants who get to be official members upon receiving a significant amount of votes within a 48 hour period.
If an applicant does not get voted in, he/she may resubmit with a better profile picture and more interesting profile text.
The site was hacked this spring, revealing the names, dates of birth, drinking habits, salaries and physical attributes of its members as well as beauty ratings, educational details, genders, job titles, passwords, personal descriptions, interests, smoking habits and whether members own a car or a house.
One security expert told told Forbes that 15 million private messages, some of which contained salacious requests, had also been leaked. The data was being traded online, Mr Hunt added. The site was hacked when it first launch in 2011 but in that hack, an estimated 30,000 people were allowed to gain access and admitted to the site before being vetted.
In 2015, the site kicked out about 3,000 for no longer being beautiful. What? And the site, which has rejected 7.5 million applicants since it first launched in 2002, is responsible for people getting plastic surgery to gain admittance.
I was unable to confirm if the site had actually launched its egg and sperm donor bank or not but I did find one commentary blog post from this year about it.
Our update response: meh. still superficial. The closing tagline on the “about” page on the website still gives us negative feels:
“BeautifulPeople provides the ideal platform to meet new and beautiful people. It is a smart technology and is geared towards a user friendly environment. The walled community also assures privacy and an exclusive virtual world for the aesthetically blessed only.”