[icon color=”#e96a2a” size=”16px” name=”awesome-file-alt”] March 30, 2015 –

Online dating service BeautifulPeople.com kicked 3,000 of its approved members off the Website for letting themselves go and no longer qualifying for being “beautiful.” The site has long courted controversy by only letting people deemed “beautiful” on the outside to be a part of the service. Such controversy has earned them publicity on major news network shows and popular Websites.

Editor’s Note: Normally we link to a dating service mentioned in a news story. However, we find the concept behind the dating site in this story to be so repulsive that we’ve made an editorial decision not to link to them.

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Membership approval for the service is done via what they call a “democratic rating process” where members of the site vote to allow others in – or ban them – based solely on their photos. Only 1 out of every 10 member requests are approved using this process.

“Having an exclusive dating site is not without controversy,” says Greg Hodge, the managing director of the service. “There will always be a degree of jealousy from those who don’t make the cut.”

Hodge was referencing a recent “revolt” to the news that 3,000 members were kicked for “letting themselves go” and becoming too ugly for the service. Organized attacks on the site came from social media where people signed up using fake photos of models to gain entry and influence the voting process.

“We had large spikes in numbers applying to join the site using profiles which immediately raised the suspicions of our administrators,” says Hodge. “When we examined the applications in more detail, we noticed a large number of what appeared to be fake profile pictures. We then traced this back to various social media sites calling for an attack on our site. Thankfully, through swift action by our administrators, vigilant members and the introduction of an extra level of verification has meant that we have been able to root out the attackers and ensure that our site remains beautiful and exclusive.”

The service, launched in 2009, claims to have 800,000 “beautiful members.” Shortly after their global launch they claim to have turned away 1.8 million people for being “too ugly” to use their service.