Yahoo Beauty Staff
HowHot.io’s website campaign. (Photo: Blinq)
Last week, an addictive new app launched to fuel our selfie obsession. Just upload a photo and howhot.io will rate your facial attractiveness on a scale of “hmm…” to “godlike.” The site was created by Swiss dating app Blinq and garnered 2 million views in its first two days. The idea is that the attractiveness algorithm will eventually help Blinq users choose the best of several photos they upload.
The algorithm was formed based on Blinq’s users’ preferences. The company put 100,000 photos, including celebrities, into their app and used the 20 million responses (“hi” or “bye”) to determine the features their users found most attractive. Of course, this makes the algorithm biased in favor of Swiss beauty standards. “Attractiveness is highly subjective and its perception differs from culture to culture,” the disclaimer reads. “Our algorithm is trained on the pictures of the BLINQ community that is mainly based in Switzerland. In other parts of the world the perception might be very different.” I took the site for a spin and here’s what happened:
Blinq’s rating app was not very flattering.
I opted for a #nomakeup photo to get the most honest results I could. Full disclosure, I had just had my eyebrows dyed at the time of the photo and I’m a firm believer in the power of brows to frame your face. But brows on fleek and all, I just don’t measure up according to the app, earning an “ok” rating. The algorithm also guessed that I was 19, four years younger than I am. So far I’m not thrilled about my results, but could it be the lighting?
Round two on Blinq’s rating app proved a bit more successful.
I gave it another go with a selfie I took when I tried out the new Microsoft Selfie app. Since Microsoft put my face through the wringer, my skin and the lighting should be perfect. The perfect skin helped me climb the ladder of attractiveness, and get a year closer to my true age, but when “godlike” is an option, I still wasn’t satisfied with “nice”.
Blinq’s users may be inclined towards heavy makeup.
In round three on Blinq, I tried out a photo with heavy makeup from when I went undercover to beauty counters. Apparently my makeup was the ticket to success, because this photo and three others I tried with obvious makeup like red lipstick earned me a “hot” rating on Blinq. This time, the app also guessed my age correctly (the photo was taken days before my 23rd birthday). Does it really take this much makeup for me to look my age, though? I always knew I had a baby face, but not one that made me look four years younger than I am. Microsoft had the answer with how-old.net. Their algorithm is more developed than Blinq’s, and it proved 100 percent accurate for me. This is likely because their method of determining age is objective. Microsoft Data Scientist James Andrew Marquardt explains that how-old.net’s algorithm was developed by “acquiring a large number of portraits where the age/gender of the subject is known,” and then identifying the face as the area of the photo to evaluate. Seems a lot less biased than Blinq’s method.
Microsoft’s How-Old.net guessed my age correctly every time.
Microsoft’s truly unbiased guess at my age made me wonder how my face would measure up on an objective attractiveness scale. I turned to pinkmirror.com, a site that rates facial beauty based on the geometric proportions of facial features. It employs aesthetic principles like the neoclassical Rule of Fifths and Rule of Thirds to determine beauty, then ranks you on a facial attractiveness scale of 0-10. A fun twist is that it generates a perfected version of your face as well.
PinkMirror gave me a much more favorable rating than HowHot.io.
I was flattered to earn an overall 8.8 on pinkmirror.com, accompanied by a breakdown of each of my facial features. Like howhot.io, pinkmirror.com has a disclaimer to make sure you don’t beat yourself up too much over a robot’s opinion of your face. “Please note that the face score system with PinkMirror has limitations and is not final,” the site reads. “Beauty is the proportion of the whole face, rather than individual features.” I thought it was interesting that they said this considering the site does give you a rating on the proportion of the whole face. Once my ego was restored, I tried putting my newly perfected face back into howhot.io.
HowHot.io just doesn’t like my face.
Even after my facial proportions and blemishes had been digitally poked and prodded into an “ideal” version of my face, howhot.io wasn’t having it, demoting me to a “hmm…” rating and guessing my age as 18. I can’t win.
Related:
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New Study Reveals That Women Criticize Themselves Eight Times a Day
The Evolution of the Perfect Female Body
