What a picture's worth

I realized that on this site where I have a dating profile posted that people can also rate your photo unless you turn off the setting. Obviously, I clicked through curious to see how my photo performed.

There are three pictures of me on the site. The main photo is the one that people saw in the image ratings. It's a photo of me from a party, I cut around some friends to get a decent head shot. I'm wearing a red, v-neck sweater with shoulder-length, black hair. The picture is zoomed enough that my freckles cause a slight discoloration to my skin. I have a friendly, though not enthusiastic, smile on my face.

At the time I created the mug shot, I thought it was a representation of myself. Plus I tend to think bright colored clothing is complimentary. You can imagine how I felt with my average rating was 4.2 (or something) out of 10. Ouch. I don't claim to be a beauty queen, but I think I look okay.

As I perused other people's photos, I came to realize two things (interesting things anyhow). People's preferences and concepts of attractiveness are heterogeneous. This could be learned preference, cultural preference, etc. In my own succession of ratings on other people's photos, I found that my opinion matched more than 50% of the time with the photo's average score. However, there were many times when I was surprised to see the photo received a two-point worse or better rating than what I had marked.

The other point... do you remember the site "Hot or Not?" I went through that website a couple times so years ago. In that case, I recall thinking that people's ratings of each other were somewhat inflated. It was rare to find people who's pictures scored lower than 7. Here, however, my impression was the average scores were more between 4 and 5. Rating scales can be very arbitrary and values have different meanings to people. An 8, for example, is much more significant when the average person is scoring 5 versus everyone scoring 7.5. And, it could just be that on that site people were more conscious about putting on their best face.

For fun, I changed the picture that I made available for rating. The second picture is one that was taken of me while vacation. It has a much more romantic background and shows my upper half. My face is less detailed but you can see that I'm a petite woman. The photo is a little uncomfortable for me to show because it's the closest I've ever looked to having a model pose with my hair slightly flowing in the breeze. I'm not wearing anything skimpy or sexy, but the clothing is definitely more trendy.

Can you guess how it's doing? I'm averaging 6.5 after one day of votes (less than 20 votes). I can't remember how many votes the former picture had (data gets erased when you change photos). I seemed to do a little better with women than men. Right now, I only have male votes. I wonder how much the better background influences the rating.

I have a debate with various girlfriends about the types of pictures to post on dating sites. Do you put yourself out there with a really attractive picture which might get the attention of the wrong types of men but gives you more hits? Or do you want to be contacted based on a realistic, everyday picture? Then there is the philosophy of providing a slightly plain photos because you want them to like how you might looking after waking up in the morning and to judge you more on your personality. I think the answer is whatever makes you comfortable.

I don't really like having my picture on display like this, so it's time to take it down from being rated.