Turn on that bathroom light and take a good look in the mirror. Examine the crow’s feet, the receding hairline, the bump on your nose, the sagging curve of your cheeks, the lopsided smile. Like what you see?
I sure hope so. If beauty is in the eye of the beholder, then the beholder who sees herself every morning should celebrate her reflection.
I’m a devotee of a simple philosophy: Beauty — true beauty, not the two-dimensional kind you find on magazine covers and on the big screen — radiates from within. It weathers bad hair days, rejection, unemployment, make-up malfunctions and the relentless onslaught of aging.
So I was intrigued, a bit miffed really, when I read about Apple’s top-selling application for its iPhone and iPad: the Ugly Meter. Though the application has been around for more than a year, it shot up to claim the No. 1 spot in the iTunes charts after it was featured on shock jock Howard Stern’s radio show on Sirius a few days ago.
The Ugly Meter is today’s answer to the Pet Rock of the 1970s. Most of us are smacking our foreheads wondering why we didn’t come up with such a stupid idea ourselves. We could be laughing all the way to the bank. Dapper Gentlemen, the app company that developed the Ugly Meter, reportedly made $80,000 in a single day. Think about that: $80,000 for something that might have gotten you clocked in another life.
Ugly Meter Pro, the advanced version, allows a user to snap an image of a face and then scan the bone structure to measure more than 100 facial points. It uses the Golden Ratio, a number derived from an equation that has been around since the ancient Greeks, to mathematically calculate how good-looking a person is on a scale of 1 to 100. The score corresponds with comments such as, You’re so ugly, you could make a glass eye cry. If a user wants more humiliation (or praise), she can tweet the score and post it on Facebook.
Download it if you’re curious about your mug. Some celebrities have already had their image scanned. Brad Pitt got a 91, Beyonce a 92 and Howard Stern a 34. Barack Obama, with a 74, beat out Mitt Romney’s 66. We’ll see how that translates into votes in November.
One of the app’s developers, Eugene Overline, says the Ugly Meter is just a game and shouldn’t be taken seriously. I believe him, but I also understand why anti-cyberbullying activists fear the app could encourage unmerciful teasing of our most vulnerable children. The Ugly Meter plays on our insecurities, many of which are already stoked by the display of Photoshopped celebrities and models.
You might not own a smart phone or even be interested in playing games on a tiny screen, but the popularity of Ugly Meter is nevertheless something to note. It’s yet another reminder of the superficiality of a society growing increasingly vapid, a society that has produced Octomom Nadya Suleman (who filed for bankruptcy shortly after posing for a semi-nude spread) and celebrity gadfly Paris Hilton (who is famous for being famous and rich.)
Come to think of it, both Suleman and Hilton would probably score high on Ugly Meter’s attractiveness scale. But for me, it’s impossible to see past the internal ugliness.
Too bad tuners will not be eligible 
Creators of the Ugly Meter iPhone App offer cash prize to Ugliest User
How ugly are you? For over 3 million users, Ugly Meter has been the go-to iPhone App that won’t lie when it comes to determining how attractive or ugly you are. Just snap a picture of yourself (or someone else) in the app and hit the scan button. The Ugly Meter will scan your face and determine just how ugly you are and dispense advice accordingly. Ugly Meter then allows you to post the results to Facebook or Twitter.
To celebrate the app’s popularity, the Ugly Meter’s creators are now running a contest where they will judge the ugly pictures uploaded to Twitter and public Facebook profiles in the month of December, determining which is the ugliest. The “winner” will be awarded a $1,000 cash prize and will have the prestige of being named the World’s Ugliest User 2011!
All users need to do to enter to win $1,000 in cash is post your ugliest face to your Facebook or Twitter account. That’s it, users will be automatically entered. The contest is judged based on ugliness and score, so make sure you take as many pictures as possible to put those horrible looks to work.
Who will the big winner be? It could be anyone, so make an ugly face and post it to Facebook or Twitter and you could be $1,000 richer than all your “pretty” friends in no time. Winner will be posted online at
http://www.uglymeter.net.
This contest is sponsored by Dapper Gentlemen, the application developer. Apple is not a sponsor of this contest or affiliated with this contest in any way.
