This Dating App Lets You Skip Right To The Ryan Gosling Lookalikes

By John Paul Titlow , July 07, 2017

For something that’s become so incredibly efficient, online dating can still be arduous: All that swiping, the mismatches, figuring out what to say, dodging weirdos—not to mention the awkwardness of an underwhelming first date. What if you could just cruise through the massive sea of randos and head straight to the people that look like your biggest celebrity crushes?

Well, now you can. Badoo, a U.K.-based dating app with 60 million global users, recently launched a “lookalike” feature that lets you search for people based on who they happen to resemble. That includes celebrities (there are over 600 alleged Ryan Gosling lookalikes on Badoo), your office crush, or whoever else; the app lets you upload photos of whoever you want in order to find lookalikes. Then, using image recognition technology, Badoo will do its best to show you similar-looking faces.

Badoo’s image-matching tech identifies 160 different facial features like chin size, eye brows, hair color, and the distance between one’s eyes, extracting those details and assigning a unique combination of numbers to each face. The system then uses these numbers to find the best matches among the many millions of images on Badoo.

The site comes preloaded with several recognizable faces to choose from. You can search for people who look like Justin Bieber or Jessica Alba, if that’s what suits your fancy. Or you can curiously scroll through a grid of people who have the unfortunate distinction of kind of resembling Donald Trump, which is an option for some reason.

In addition to letting you upload photos of anyone, Badoo also connects to your Facebook account so you can find people who look like your friends, colleagues, family members, and those random people from high school who sometimes post inspirational quotes.

Depending on your perspective, this is either a cool innovation or incredibly creepy. But considering all the weird, unpleasant crap that goes on in dating apps every day, how bad could it be? At the same time, I’d hate to meet my future wife on a dating site because she uploaded a picture of her high school sweetheart and decided I was the next best thing.

Whether you’re morbidly curious or think this may be the answer to the dry spell in your love life, you can try Badoo’s lookalike search tool here.

Badoo has launched a “lookalike” feature so users can search for people who (sort of) look like their dream date.