Social Networking Site Removes Members Considered Too Fat

More than 5,000 people have lost their membership to a social networking site BeautifulPeople.com because they had supposedly become too fat over the Christmas holiday period to continue to qualify as 'beautiful'.

BeautifulPeople is a site which states on its homepage that CNN has dubbed it "The sexiest website in the world today". The site goes on to ask potential members:

Do looks matter to you, when it comes to selecting a partner?

Do you want to guarantee your dates will always be beautiful?

And then details the service it can provide:

No more filtering through unattractive people on mainstream sites

Meet beautiful people locally and from around the world - now

Attend exclusive events and private parties

The Telegraph notes that those who wish to join BeautifulPeople.com must submit a photograph and brief profile. Members of the opposite sex then decide which of the applicants should be allowed to join the site by registering a vote of "Yes definitely", "Hmm yes, OK", "Hmm no, not really" or "NO Definitely NOT" based on the photographs and profiles that have been submitted. In recent days a number of the site's members, described as "vigilant" in the BeautifulPeople news release that can be viewed on PR Newswire, called for action after some of their fellow members posted pictures of themselves celebrating Christmas and New Year, the pictures allegedly revealing that certain people had "let themselves go". Greg Hodge is Managing Director of BeautifulPeople, a business which has its headquarters in Denmark, and he explained the process his site followed to weed out those members who were no longer sufficiently beautiful. Mr Hodge said:

We responded to complaints by moving the newly chubby members back to the rating stage. This is the same as having them re-apply. Their re-applications were reviewed by existing members and only a few hundred were voted back in. Over 5,000 were rejected

Robert Hintze, founder of BeautifulPeople, added that "Letting fatties roam the site is a direct threat to our business model", while Mr Hodge elaborated on how members of Western cultures are known for their over-indulgence and lack of exercise during the holiday period. Of the 5,000 plus people who are now ex-members of BeautifulPeople, the former beauties are being encouraged to reapply to join the site once "they are back looking their best". More than 1,500 people from the U.S., 1,520 to be precise, have now apparently lost their beauty, perhaps only on a temporary basis, according to the members of BeautifulPeople, with 832 people in the U.K. and 533 people in Canada in the same predicament. Poland is another country in which in excess of 500 people are at present less beautiful than they once were. It is not made clear how many of the 550,000 members BeautifulPeople claims to have in 190 countries are based in the U.S., Canada, Poland and the U.K.