Think Kim Kardashian is sexy? This app matches you with celebrity lookalikes, writes Maia Silber.
Andrey Andreev - founder of Badoo, the social networking site - has long tried to crack down on a breach of dating-site etiquette.
“People from time to time upload pictures of Angelina Jolie,” he said. Or Justin Bieber.
So Andreev worked with a team to identify and remove fake celebrity profiles, using facial recognition technology to spot photos downloaded from the internet. But while he was weeding out the fake Angies, Andreev realised that he could use that technology for another purpose.
“We could use this for lookalikes,” he said. No one wants to be tricked by a celebrity poser, but who wouldn’t want to date a Joseph Gordon-Levitt doppelgänger?
Now, Badoo has released a “lookalikes” feature that allows the site’s more than 350 million users to search for potential matches that resemble their celebrity crushes. You can search for the doppelgängers of 16 000 celebrities and counting r.
Gender studies professors would have a field day with Badoo’s most frequently searched celebrities - Barack Obama lookalikes are the most sought-after men, while Kim Kardashian doppelgängers are the most popular women. Andreev didn’t expect that a certain septuagenarian would attract so many clicks - “Donald Trump”. “This was a surprise.”
The site’s celebrity lookalikes aren’t exactly doppelgängers - but they share general features: face shapes, hairstyles, etc.