Could You Find Love With Your Look-Alike?
March 24, 2011— -- Want to know the secret behind human attraction? Finding a partner who looks just like you.
Or at least that's the theory behind FindYourFaceMate.com, a dating site launched this month by New Yorker Christina Bloom.
Once you upload your picture, the site uses facial recognition technology to zoom in on nine points of your face -- your eyes, ears, nose, chin, as well as the corners and center of your mouth -- to find you a match. When it spots "face mates," it alerts the pair.
"If you look at most couples, you see that these facial features are very similar," Bloom said. "I really believe that getting this theory out there will help people."
The would-be matchmaker said her notion that people are more attracted to those that look like them came from personal experience and years of observation.
About 20 years ago, she said, she started dating her own male doppelgänger and said she felt an unparalleled attraction.
"I had such a strong attraction to him and it was like nothing I had ever experienced before," she said. "Our facial features were very similar and we were told that we looked like brother and sister everywhere we went. Then I started noticing couples everywhere I went."
She noticed the phenomenon among friends and family, as well Hollywood stars, like Iman and David Bowie, Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton, Heidi Klum and Seal and Paul Newman and Joanne Woodward.
Bloom wrote a small gift book on the theory and later launched a blog, but about a year and a half ago she decided to get serious about putting her theory to work.
"I knew. I knew in my gut that there was something going on here," she said. "I realized that the only way I'd get this out there was to create a dating website."
The site, which is powered by Face.com's facial recognition technology, has attracted about 8,000 people. For testing out the service in its early days, those users get to take part for free. But once the site reaches a critical mass, Bloom said she'll likely charge a fee similar to that of other dating sites.
