Do Women Like Balding Men? – The Big Tinder Experiment

One of THE biggest worries of men who have started balding is whether or not women will still find them attractive.

Some people claim your hairline doesn’t matter when it comes to attracting women, as well as others that say it matters, A LOT.

Just browsing online, you will find many different (and shocking) views on this matter:

As you can see, people have strong and polarizing opinions on this subject.

However, there has never been a RIGOROUS, SCIENTIFIC experiment to actually test these claims!

So, we decided to determine if hair loss actually affects your chances with women with a careful, data-driven experiment.

We wanted to find a convenient and effective way of gathering data from thousands of women, so we decided to use the infamous online dating app Tinder.

Before you keep reading – try to guess what the conclusion of this experiment was!

(Once you reach the end of this article you’ll see if you were correct.)

The Experiment

We started by creating two profiles of the same person – same photos, same bio, etc.

BUT – one profile had a full head of hair, while the other was balding.

(The guy was balding in the original set of photos, so we photoshopped him to create the profile with the full head of hair)

We kept every single variable of the profiles constant except the hairlines so that we could test the effect of the different hairlines, without other variables affecting the data.

Here are the Tinder profiles so you can see the difference in hairlines:

And here are the relevant photos up close so you can get an even closer look of the hairlines:

Once the profiles were set and in place, we changed the settings to show women within an age range of 18-30 and a realistic distance of 15 miles.

We chose that age range as it represents the bulk of women on Tinder, plus we wanted women who were more selective in terms of looks (as older women are likely to prioritize other traits). 

Then we got busy swiping!

Our aim was to reach 10’000 swipes per profile across 10 cities, making it 1000 swipes per city. With 10’000 swipes, our data would be statistically significant to draw a solid conclusion.

We managed to “travel” to every one of these different cities with the use of a Tinder Gold subscription, allowing us to change the location to wherever we wanted.

Each profile had a different set of 10 cities to prevent confusion among women there since the profiles were the same (except for the hair).

However, we swiped in the same countries or very similar ones to get the most accurate data possible (e.g London vs. Paris, Moscow vs. Saint Petersburg).

We stayed in each city for approximately 24 hours to gather as many matches as we would, then moved on to the next one on the list.

Also, we swiped right on every single profile we came across to make the experiment as consistent as possible.

Selectively swiping would’ve led to inconsistent and distorted data since selection criteria such as attractiveness is very subjective.

For each match we got, we waited seven days to see if the girl would initiate a conversation.

IF they didn’t start a conversation within the seven-day time frame, we would initiate the conversation ourselves with a simple “Hi”.

We then waited another seven days after that to see if they would respond.

The RESULTS

After going through the above process for all 20 cities (10 for each profile), we went through the process of collecting as much data as we could.

We counted the number of matches, conversations initiated by women, and replies to conversations initiated by us.

We then broke down the data by profile and city.

Finally, we sorted everything in a clean and organized manner.

Here is a quick summary of our findings and two pie charts showing the main highlights from the data we collected:

Balding Profile

Matches: 147 (1.47%)

Girls Opening: 20 (14%)

Girls Opened: 127 (86%)

Girls Responding: 70 (55%)

Full Head of Hair Profile

Matches: 243 (2.43%)

Girls Opening: 22 (9%)

Girls Opened: 221 (91%)

Girls Responding: 110 (50%)

And here are the detailed graphs that show our more detailed findings from the experiment:

(click the graph to view in full size)

*girls opening means they messaged us first

*girls opened means we messaged them first

Now, you’re probably curious to how some of the conversations went, so here are some of the highlights –

Balding Profile (click image to view in full size):

Full Head of Hair Profile (click image to view in full size):

Interesting stuff right?

Notice a difference between the two profiles?

(It’s quite obvious that the girls were much more eager towards the profile with a full head of hair).

Conclusion & Final Thoughts

As you clearly saw – the number of matches, conversations initiated by girls, and replies were clearly tilted in favor of the man with the full head of hair.

So essentially, women DO find men with a full head of hair more attractive. You can argue that’s not the case in every situation, but it is at least on Tinder and other similar dating sites as well.

There’s a good article about dating as a bald guy here.

Why is this?

We had a theory that having a full head of hair makes you appear younger, which also signals a whole range of other desirable traits to women.

So we put this to the test – where we surveyed 1000 people per profile to guess the age.

We found that the average age guess for the balding man was 32.6 and 30.7 for the man with a full head of hair.

A slight difference, but likely not too great to indicate that looking younger is the reason for the discrepancy of success on Tinder.

However – as an interesting side note, the rate of girls initiating the conversation and opener response rate was actually higher for the bald profile (as you saw in the graphs above).

This could be due to girls viewing this man as a “safer” option that wasn’t just on Tinder for sex.

Perhaps girls looking for a serious relationship with provider types are more likely to initiate conversations.

Or they were more intimidated by the man with the full head of hair.

(This is just hypothesizing, we don’t know the reason behind it for sure unless we ask the women ourselves.)

But overall, the man with the full head of hair had better results in terms of absolute numbers.

To sum it up, it’s clearly better to have a full head of hair if you want to be more attractive in the eyes of women.

Maybe it’s super obvious – but an experiment was never done to back up the claim.

Until now.

So if you ever had an argument with a friend about whether being bald or losing hair hurts your chances with women, you now have the answer.

That’s not to say you can’t get women without hair, but it DEFINITELY helps.

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