Adult dating and photo swapping

However, as I swiped on, it became clear that this less made-up version of me was simply alluring a slightly different type of woman.

As opposed to the trendy, high-femme girls I'd been pairing with before, now my matches were women who looked, well, more like the new me—a little outdoorsier and lower-maintenance, both in their aesthetic and demeanor.

At the end of 2017, after hurtling full-speed out of a seven-year-long relationship, I became a single adult for the first time in my life.

Though, the change in my image was palpable enough that I did notice one woman who I'd matched with the day before my experiment unmatched me as soon as I changed all my photos.

This was certainly no formal scientific investigation, but I was interested to see: Leading with a more "natural" version of myself, would I get fewer matches? I realized the only photos I possessed of myself totally makeup-free were of me on vacation—fresh off a flight to Hawaii, sailing on a recent family trip to the Galapagos, camping.

For that reason, my new makeup-free persona looked way more adventurous than the cosmopolitan indoor-cat image I had been portraying before.

For years, I'd theorized about what "type" of woman I was most attracted to but had never gotten to test the waters IRL.

So I went in with a wide-open mind, and when I started consistently matching with stylish, trendy femmes, I was not mad about it.