The Beautiful People website turns ugly—promoting the beautiful World Cup players while disgracing those less blessed. Ugly people can now get at least a half-beautiful baby using the site’s new virtual sperm and egg bank, don’t count on a mix of beauty and brains—the founder suggests Mensa utilize its own database for those seeking intelligence in reproduction.
To become a website member of the Beautiful People community, the site’s existing members rate an applicant's looks (aka, beauty) to let you in—kind of like high school all over again. So, whoever missed out on the first round during teen years, can now live—or simply relive—the experience now.
After what was circulated as a PR stunt at the end of last year—when the Beautiful People site supposedly kicked off 5,000 members for being fat—any current spamming wouldn’t exactly serve as a surprise. The site seems to be gettin’ its spam on, with a bit of nastiness thrown in—and throwing any supposed ‘beauty’ into a nosedive:
The Beautiful People homepage encourages users to “Check out the most beautiful World Cup players”—better understood when it’s clarified that featured football player shown is named as part of the Beautiful People membership. But that doesn’t preclude the site from using (or abusing) the world’s specialized sports teams. What better way to spam search engines than by listing the name of every World Cup player and text which includes terms like “Beauty Score: Argentina” Looking for a World Cup “Score” for “Argentina” in Google?—then you just may be ‘accidentally’ run across the Beautiful People website instead.
Any nastiness doesn’t end there--clicking the link to World Cup players will take users straight to a second ‘homepage’ of sorts or sub-site—and, once there, users have the option to rank the football players. But if you’re not feeling the itch to rate the football players, Beautiful People will help prompt you—by featuring photos of the least ‘beautiful’ alongside those ranked most beautiful. A quick glance at the attached image exemplifies the poor souls who are fortunate to rank among the world’s best athletes—since Beautiful People makes it clear that they don’t rank among the most gorgeous.
After allegedly removing fat people—and the sudden interest garnered by that little stunt—the site seems to be at it again—only this time the stunt involves offering sperm in order to produce a bundle of beautiful kids. Started roughly 8 years ago, in 2002, the Beautiful People site wants to oblige the world’s plain and frumpy through offering a chance to produce beautiful kids. Dubbed its “fertility introduction service”, the website’s recent venture involves a "virtual sperm and egg bank for people who want to have beautiful babies.”
By offering sperm to the general world, it seems the founder missed the fact that less-than-beautiful babes could still arrive—if the ‘ugly’ use beautiful sperm, there’s still that other part of the gene pool involved. But a half-full cup of beautiful is apparently better than none.
Beautiful People website founder Robert Hintze said: “Initially, we [Beautiful People] hesitated to widen the offering [of sperm] to non-beautiful people. But everyone--including ugly people --would like to bring good looking children in to the world and we can't be selfish with our attractive gene pool.”
Such a way with words—and what a formation of complex thoughts and expression. Following a virtual slam of Mensa, that the company could consider doing something similar with a sperm donor program utilizing the Mensa database, Hinze’s own words reflect that beauty and intelligence are well-separated in his world. And that may be the case--Mensa probably doesn’t need to worry about a missing member. The world should know now: apparently there is no such thing as beauty and brains, not according to Hinze’s words anyways.
The Beautiful People website--which claims to be a game reserve of "leopards and gazelles" compared to other dating sites (referring to competing sites as full of "jungles of hippos and warthogs”) supposedly cut 5,000 website members over Christmas. The reason: supposedly a fat factor—however that ‘news’ has been called a PR stunt. Allegedly—and a big allegedly—5,000 website members awoke to find their accounts inactivated due to holiday weight gain, and after members posted photos in the post-holiday timeframe.
Want to know more about the Beautiful People website? Well, you probably won’t get that info so easily--clicking on the About Beautiful People link yields nothing but a refresh of the site’s homepage. But more importantly, how about some snapshots of the founder, managing director or any other staff. Considering all this beauty talk, how could such vital pics be missing—unless, of course, there’s another explanation. Hmmm…. Maybe the founder’s the dark-haired one on the homepage?—or are none of those people members of Beautiful People?
The Beautiful People website claims that 600 beautiful babies have been born to members who met while using its site, or through its services—it sounds like a somewhat interesting statistic (or more accurately, not totally boring)—until anyone considers that the number doesn’t really differ from other dating sites. More specifically, the number doesn’t really differ from life in general: people meet, and mate—that’s the pattern. It’s not exactly extraordinary that 600 babies have supposedly been born to members—but, since the website doesn’t seem to have a lot of stats, a number’s a number.
So now the Beautiful People website has set up the beautiful DNA bank—for members are married or in a relationship, but need an external sperm donor-- in order to accelerate the birthing process of ‘beauties’. That’d be PR stunt number two.
The ‘managing director’ for the Beautiful People website, Greg Hodge, issued the statement: “Attractiveness is one of the first qualities that people want in a child. We [human beings] are all more open and accommodating to attractive people, and anyone would want their child to have as many advantages as possible, so this is no different.”
Hodge added, “For a site with members who resemble Brad Pitt, George Clooney and Angelina Jolie you can imagine the demand.” Wow-that’s quite a statement: a claim of website members who look like Brad Pitt, George Clooney and Angelina Jolie—that would certainly make it odd that there is so many people that good looking who have found their way to the site. With site stats of 600,000 members, that’s a heck of a lot of Pitts, Clooneys and Jolies around the globe. While everyone’s been trying to find the perfect mate, apparently they’re all hiding out on the Beautiful People website—now that the tip is out, dating life will certainly be easier now—it’s just so weird and coincidental that all those insanely good-looking people are looking for dates online.
In reference to the new sperm donor program match-up, Hodge says, “Obviously it's going to be controversial, but it's human nature that people want to be with people they find attractive, and have babies with people they find attractive. Exclusion is present throughout society”
The “have babies with people they find attractive” part is a bit of an unusual add-on to a statement—a bit of a ‘cart before the horse’. People tend to “have babies with people they find attractive” because of sexual attraction.
Hodge apparently felt the need to cover every base, stating “We're [the Beautiful People site] not saying that beauty is the only important quality. Intellect is important as well, so maybe Mensa could do a similar thing with the people on their databases”
Whew—it’s good to know that “intellect is important as well”—for a moment it appeared intellect was going to be thrown out the window altogether. That means Mensa can start up its own site and dub it Ugly Smart People.
The most intriguing statement on behalf of Beautiful People is Hodge’s expression that, “There are no financial benefits for us [the Beautiful People website] in doing this [sperm donor service availability]--we are simply responding to a demand for attractive donors.”
Who knew the Beautiful People website is humanitarian, and just downright thoughtful—to supposedly provide a service that’s going to the company “no financial benefit” at all. The world certainly needs more businesses like that—who have no motivation, and not a thing to gain when offering a service that’s going to cost them in all the resources needed for implementation and management—and all for nothing in return. That good-hearted move on behalf of the Beautiful People site couldn’t have one thing to do with wack attempts to boost traffic in order to garner some serious ad revenue down the line.
In the meantime, where’s that photo of founder Hinze? Apparently he hasn’t chosen to bless the world with displays of his beauty—but we can all only hold out hope.
Maybe all of those ‘fat’ people shouldn’t have been kicked off—while February marked media exposure for the site, and a huge traffic boost that shot to 93,000, the month of May plummeted the company to a rough estimate of about 5,000. Maybe the beautiful people are shrinking with the economy.
Don’t gain weight people…or you might lose the remainder of your beautiful people—then what will the world do?