The SNEWS View: Beautiful People website says 'no' to ugly…and that hurts

More than 1.8 million people received confirmation within weeks of a new website launching that they are, in fact, ugly.

The bearer of the bad news was BeautifulPeople.com, an international dating site whose members must qualify as being sufficiently attractive, according to a PR Newswire report. (Click here to read the article.) The site went live on Oct. 26, and in the following two weeks 360,000 people qualified. As for the thousands who were rejected…well, they probably have good personalities.

We figure that people in the outdoor and fitness industries have a better-than-average chance of qualifying for the dating site because a good physique definitely plays a part. The site actually ranks countries according to the beauty of their people, and Britain is pretty low because, “They don’t spend as much time polishing up their appearance and they are letting themselves down on physical fitness,” said Greg Hodge, managing director of BeautifulPeople.com. “Next to Brazilian and Scandinavian beauties, British people just aren’t as toned or glamorous.”

Walk around the Outdoor Retailer show or Health & Fitness Business show, and it’s clear that we’re a collection of well-tanned, fit folks. Surely, all the exercise and sunshine works in our favor. Well, for some folks anyway.

As investigative journalists, the SNEWS® crew was at first tempted to qualify for BeautifulPeople.com to get an insider’s look, but a quick review of our staff profile pictures killed that idea pretty quick. Granted, we’ve been told by family members that we’re beautiful, but you can’t trust their biased opinions. I have a photo from 1978 in which I’m sporting a bowl haircut and plaid pants, and to this day, Mom looks at it and says, “Oh, don’t you look handsome!” See what I mean?

Naturally, BeautifulPeople.com has come under fire for being shallow and elitist, and the site’s existence probably raises broader implications about the rise of discrimination in society. But we’re not really here to debate those issues. We’re here to point out that, if you live in the United States, statistics show that there’s a good chance you’re ugly.

Of the 540,000 current members of BeautifulPeople.com, only 24 percent of males and 37 percent of females are from the United States. Now, we don’t claim to be experts in statistics, but by our calculations, this means that if you’re a U.S. male, there’s a 76 percent chance you have a face that only your mother could love. Put in other mathematical terms, more than two-thirds of American males fell out of the Ugly Tree and hit every branch on the way down. We won’t expound on the female figures because you women out there would probably punch us next time you walk by the SNEWS booth at a trade show.

OK, so we may have bruised a few male egos with this report. But, here’s a suggestion: Book a flight to Russia or Poland. The guys in each of those countries represent just 9 percent of BeautifulPeople.com members. Must be the harsh winters, huh? Wonder what the outdoor or fitness trade show scene is there.

Wherever your industry travels may take you in the next year, we’re recommending you steer clear of Sweden. The fair-haired people in that country represent a whopping 65 percent of BeautifulPeople.com members. That whole dang country must be swarming with hotties. It could be they’re just born with superior genes, but we’re also willing to bet they never owned plaid pants.

–Marcus Woolf