New Site Helps You Date Your Lookalike

Add one to the tally of gimmicky dating sites offering love by unconventional means: Findyourfacemate.com will allow daters to seek people who look like them.

The rationale, according to New York Magazine: a study shows couples are more likely to look alike than non-couples (the magazine offers Peter Sarsgaard and Maggie Gyllenhaal as celeb examples). So maybe people will be more attracted to those who kind of resemble them. To facilitate this, Findyourfacemate (which doesn’t seem to have set up its site yet) will use a nine-point comparison test and send you your lookalikes. This is, however, just the beginning of the process. You can still view information about matches and screen them based on whether they like hiking or Haruki Murakami or whatever.

Also, emphasizes founder Christina Bloom, “We say that the chemistry and the face matching is the required first step.” The next step, actually liking each other and having a successful relationship, may be more complicated. Bloom should know: she came up with the idea for Findyourfacemate.com after discovering she looked a lot like her ex-husband (“like brother and sister,” she claims). But since they’re divorced, the power of facial resemblance clearly only went so far.

The whole concept of Findyourfacemate.com seems a little strange, since it’s about systematizing attraction, something people are probably pretty good at figuring out on their own. Other dating sites try to gauge compatibility, under the theory that daters have trouble measuring this, at least at the outset. But do we really need a nine-point comparison test to tell us whether we think someone is hot? Really, Findyourfacemate — like HowAboutWe and others of its ilk — is probably just attempting to break into the crowded dating site market by offering something slightly different. But ultimately, dating is a crapshoot, whether online or off. Whether going out with your face-mate is more likely to lead to lasting love than dating, say, your favorite-kind-of-cheese-mate is anyone’s guess. One thing’s for sure — it’s more likely to get you mistaken for your lover’s sister, which is always a great recipe for romance.