Love At First Swipe

In a world ruled by bite-sized bios and split-second decisions, are appearances everything? COSMO enlisted 10 women for a month-long Tinder makeup experiment to find out

- Kate Foster

When Michael’s profile popped up on my Tinder feed, my thumb moved instinctively to swipe left. Far from my usual artsy type, his frat-boy good looks and photos featuring beer and the requisite puppy made me assume he’d be – how do I put this nicely? – a total douche bag. And since my bio touts my love of writing and punk music (unashamed hipster here), I figured he probably wouldn’t be into me either. But I was dating under cover, with a profile pic of me wearing way more makeup than I normally would – so I thought, why not? Perhaps Michael would be into this alternate version of me. I swiped right. Boom: we were a match!

The experiment

According to Tinder statistics, women wearing heavy makeup on the app are 55% more likely to be swiped right on than women wearing no makeup, and 26% more likely than women wearing light makeup.

So COSMO recruited 10 women (four are shown here) of diverse backgrounds, ethnicities and body types to dig deeper – specifically, to suss out how the way we do our makeup influences who will approach us, and how they’ll interact with us.

We spent a month swiping on Tinder: two weeks using profiles with natural makeup (nothing more than light foundation, mascara and groomed brows) and two weeks on new accounts rocking glam to the nines (full-on contour, dramatic eyes, major arches and bold lips). Photos were taken in our office to avoid outliers (resting bitch faces, insane cleavage). Everything else was kept constant between our two profiles, from bios to the number of daily right swipes.

PHASE 1

Natural