FaceTune: The Online Dating Scourge

Women on dating apps use FaceTune to make themselves look like completely different people. If you’ve wondered why your online dates don’t look like their pics, FaceTune is part of it.

For years I've told men to get off social media and limit their exposure to online dating (it is okay to use it, but it should only be a supplement, never the main course).

Nevertheless, we get guys pouring in who continue to ask the same questions again and again:

• "How can I be really HOT on social media and build a huge following?"

• "What do I need to do to CLEAN UP in online dating?"

• "Can you use social media to set up lots of dates & get laid?"

• "Why don't you guys cover more online dating tips? Meeting people in-person is so 2000s!"

But of course, get guys to be honest with you about the results they get from online dating and social media and they will admit they're let down by most of their matches.

15 years ago you could do online dating and sometimes get catfished by some chick who showed up 100 lbs. heavier than her photograph or mysteriously way uglier than she looked in her pictures. It happened to me a few times.

But if you knew what to look for, you could generally tell; fat girls have their ways of hiding fat in their photos, which girls who aren't fat don't need to turn to. Ugly girls use angles and lighting to fool the eye, while good-looking girls simply take normal pictures all straight-on. So you could just keep an eye out for 'fat girl angles' and 'ugly girl tricks' and avoid any girl whose pictures consisted of nothing but those, and you'd almost never get catfished.

Now, though, it's an epidemic, with women showing up in-person who look nothing like what they do online. What's the cause?

Based on my discussion with a few friends recently, the cause seems to be a very specific one: an app that's been on the market for years, but has gradually gone from being a thing a few women used here and there to touch up their photos a bit, to something every girl online dating in some places will use heavily simply to keep herself in the game.

The name of that app is FaceTune.