My Best Face Experiment!

[I'm trying out a new, simpler, less-gaudy layout - what do you think? Also, don't forget to let me know if you want to sign up for Thrift Store Pen Pals! I pick a new Pen Pal tomorrow!]

Online dating is getting a lot more popular these days. OkCupid is often ranked among the top free dating sites out there, and I can see why! This post isn't about online dating, but about a feature OkCupid offers, My Best Face. I promised that I'd post some of my Halloween costumes, so I decided to go a step further with My Best Face and have random people rank them. More on that later...

Whether or not you feel like doing any online dating, you can use the awesome My Best Face feature (although you do have to create an account). Basically, you submit a few pictures, the website puts your picture beside another person's picture, and random people around the world pick whether they'd rather date you or the other person. You have to be pretty confident to do this though, because if you are ugly you could be in for some harsh reality. 

Before you can receive your results you have to judge several pictures yourself. It is set up like this:

The title says "Your challenge: choose one for a date" and you get to choose one or the other. It's pretty simple. Not all the comparisons are of attractive people though; in fact, most of them are quite average, which makes perfect sense, statistically speaking. Anyway, I scoured through about 700 comparisons to could find some good ones to blog about, so here are a few examples (this is probably going to be really mean, by the way). 

A lot of these really ARE  a "challenge." I'm going to pretend that I HAVE to choose one and I will HAVE to date her in some life-or-death situation. 

Okay, I have to choose one for a date... life has presented me with only two possible options. I have to choose only one, and I better hope it's the right one. So let's see here. They're both total babes, so looks aren't a deciding factor. The one on the left looks like she's SUPER good at baking cookies, so that's a plus. The one on the right, however, clearly has a job, so she could just buy cookies. That lime green affair is not doing it for me though. I choose option 1. 

On the left we have what I can only assume is a picture taken from the back of a milk carton. Or maybe it's a mugshot from the paper, so that could mean she's fun and exciting. Either way, it's a weird picture of a picture. She's also like 70. The one on the right, although significantly younger, looks confused and senile. She has a sewing machine in the background, which means she could fix holes in my clothes. I think I'll choose option 1 for the excitement-factor. Plus I've never been with a woman with dentures.

On the left is what appears to be a goth girl. We could have seances together and play with a Ouija board at the graveyard or something, so that could be fun. The one on the right, however, appears to be the last remaining ancient Egyptian, judging by her age. I could learn a lot about history, so that's always fun. I'll choose option 2, the Sphinx.

Wow. This one is an epic challenge. So this is what life has thrown at me, and I must choose one for a date. You know what they say about life handing you lemons, and it looks like I just got two. Looks like both of these women will murder me, but the one on the left looks like she'll knit me up in a yarn-cocoon and have her cats lay eggs inside of me so their cat-larvae can feast upon me. The one on the right will just take me on a drug deal and, when she shows up without the goods, will use me as a human shield during the resulting shoot-out. I kind of like cats, so I'll choose option 1.

That was fun. My apologies to anyone who finds their picture on here - I'm sure you're a very nice person. 

Anyway, I put up a bunch of my Halloween pictures to be rated to see which one was the best. I also included a picture of me looking normal as the experiment control. When you get your report in a few days, it breaks down how everyone rated you, their age range, and their personalities, like this:

That's probably really hard to read, but if you click on the picture you can see how each type/age of person rated you. Since my normal picture got an 82, let's see how my Halloween costumes compare.

My hobo costume was rated the highest at a 66! I guess girls really go for the green beard and flannel look. This is also probably my most normal looking costume, so I'm sure that was a contributing factor in its popularity. Nerds and overachievers seemed to like the hobo the best. I guess opposites do attract.

Gold Man was a fairly close second, although as you can see from the graph, it wasn't very popular, overall. The upward facing bars are votes "for" and the downward facing bars are "against." Geeks, nerds, and stoners hate Gold Man, whereas introverts seem to like him. That makes sense, considering an introvert would like to be completely covered up. Although this suit leaves little to the imagination.

Hmm. Everyone seems to hate my girl costume, chief among them being divas and free spirits. Women over the age of 31 are also pretty dissuaded. It actually gives you a breakdown of everyone who's voted on which picture though, and predictably most of the girls who voted "for" this picture were bisexual. No surprises there.

I kind of expected Quail-Man to get more love, but he seems to be thoroughly disliked. He has one shining hope though: dorks. Some of his biggest haters are nerds and conservatives, and women over 31.

Last, and certainly least, is Dog Man with Shark Nose. This costume actually came to me in a dream and I made it a reality. I actually made it myself, as is painfully obvious. Dog Man is primarily hated by liberals, vegetarians, and girls aged 18-22. And everyone else.

These reports give me a good idea as to what costume I need to wear when I go out. As the numbers show, I should probably just stop showering, buy all my clothes from a dumpster, and grow a moldy beard. Or I could just be normal... But where's the fun in that?