This Dating App Lets You Search for Celebrity Lookalikes

Online dating is a slog. Forget true love; it can take hours of swiping just to find a few people you think are kind of cute. But maybe finding your next date would be easier if you could filter profiles by appearance—say, if they look like your favorite celebrity. That’s what the UK-based dating site Badoo is banking on, according to Fast Company.

Badoo has rolled out a new "lookalike" feature that lets you browse profiles based on how much a potential mate resembles a particular famous face. Based on image-matching technology that takes into account 160 different facial features, from chin size to eyebrow style, you can find lookalikes for actors, musicians, sports stars, and even the occasional Silicon Valley hotshot like Elon Musk or politicians like Barack Obama, in case your tastes run a little more on the dweeby side.

You can also upload your own photos to the search function, so if you aren’t over your ex, you can find someone that looks just like him or her. You can even connect your Facebook account, so that you can verify exactly which one of your high school friends looks the most like Justin Bieber.

The algorithm seems to be pretty hit or miss when it comes to actually figuring out who looks like Beyoncé or Kevin Durant, but it's not surprising that the world isn't teeming with people who look exactly like Beyoncé. And trolling for people who look like cute celebrities doesn’t seem any crazier than filling out surveys with hundreds of questions in search of your soulmate on OkCupid or spending hours mindlessly swiping on Tinder. And it's definitely no stranger than matching with someone based on their love of bacon or your mutual disdain for cargo shorts.

These days, there are not that many differences between the popular dating apps, except color schemes and the occasional feature like video uploads or Bumble’s women-message-first rule. So it's not surprising that companies are coming up with more inventive ways to help them stand out from the rest of the crowd. Now, daters who honestly just want to have dinner with a Chris Evans lookalike know which app to download.

Just maybe don’t tell your date that you only found them because you wanted to date someone who looked like Uber's disgraced ex-CEO Travis Kalanick.