Is vaping or smoking more attractive on Tinder?

On dating app Tinder, your romantic fate is decided by a handful of photos. With Valentine’s Day fast approaching, we wanted to find out whether being pictured using a traditional cigarette or an e-cigarette would influence the number of matches you’d receive. What we discovered might surprise you!

What is Tinder, anyway?

If you’re not familiar with Tinder, let us explain. Signed-up singletons are presented with pictures of other local romantics within their age range and if you find them attractive, you swipe right. If the person you’ve swiped right on also swipes right on you, then congratulations – you’ve matched! Time to unleash your best chat-up line. If it’s not love at first swipe, however, you can swipe left and never see the person again. Equally, if they swipe left on your profile you won’t match with them, even if you’ve swiped right on theirs.

How did we do the experiment?

We created three near-identical profiles: one for a smoker, one for a vaper and one with someone doing neither. We used the same person for the three profiles, with the only differences being the photos used and the generic names we used for them.

For each profile, we swiped right indiscriminately on the first 1,000 people we came across. Then we left the profiles to accumulate matches for four days, after which we checked to see just how many people found our profiles attractive.

Smoking hot?

That’s right; it was the profile with the smoker which received the most matches! Despite years of graphic anti-tobacco campaigns, plus government support for vaping, Tinder users are more likely to swipe right on a smoker than a vaper.

• The smoking profile gained 340/1000 matches, or 40% of overall swipes.
• The vaping profile gained 217/1000 matches, or 25.5% of overall swipes.
• The profile with neither gained 293/1000 matches, or 34.5% of overall swipes.

Unfortunately, it looks like there’s still much more to be done before smoking sheds its alluring image!