The Dating App That Analyzes Your Face to Find the Best Match

I have three siblings, and we all look pretty different. But my older brother and I look nothing alike. 

Besides our relative height, our physical appearances couldn’t be more different. I have dark brown, wavy hair and he has straight, strawy blond hair. I tan quickly in the summer– he gets a bad sunburn after just 30 minutes in the sun. 

From the time we were kids, everyone has been telling us how different we look.

In college, my brother started dating a girl, and I showed a picture of the happy couple to my friend. She looked at the picture of my brother and his girlfriend and said, smiling at me, “Siblings or dating?”

When I looked again, I realized just how similar my brother and his girlfriend looked. Besides both being blonde white people, they had similar smiles and facial structures, and even their eyes would squint in the same way when they smiled. They looked more alike than me and my brother did.

This led me to one of my favorite Instagram pages of all time– Siblings or Dating? The page has over 1 million followers and features user-submitted pictures of either couples or siblings. You get to submit your guess in the comments.

Couples who look alike are a phenomenon people have been noticing for a long time. Different studies offer a range of views on why this is soe, but there’s no denying we’re attracted to people like us, in one way or another.

SciMatch is the dating app tapping into that. SciMatch uses AI-powered facial analysis to create personality reports and match you with highly compatible people. Twin sisters and founders, Yanina and Viktoryia Strylets, talked to us about the app and how they’re changing the online dating game.

SciMatch’s tech was developed by a team of AI engineers and psychologists. The team worked together to create a system that considered all the important aspects of attraction, chemistry, and compatibility while integrating smart and speedy machine learning processes. 

“It’s a next-generation dating service,” Yanina said. “AI leads your heart. We’re encouraging our users to not merely rely on intuition when it comes to love, but also our science-backed algorithms.”

SciMatch Focuses on Compatibility

When Yanina and Viktoryia decided to create a dating app, they knew they had to make their platform stand out. The dating app market boasts thousands of options today, from niche apps for religious singles to apps where you stay completely anonymous.

Yanina and Viktoryia looked at how the biggest apps worked, along with how users were feeling about them. We spend a lot of time on dating apps– maybe even more than you think. 

Yanina told us that a study showed the average user spends six hours per week on dating apps, swiping an average of 4,000 times before finding a meaningful connection. And almost always, these swipes aren’t leading to dates. The sisters noticed that too many daters weren’t getting real results from online dating.

Yanina said part of the reason users weren’t getting good results is because the matching algorithms are matching based on innocuous– and sometimes untrue– information.

“According to Statista, around 4 out of 5 online daters in the U.S. admit to lying or exaggerating on dating apps or websites,” Yanina said. “So all the matching algorithms that exist today are matching people based on facts that may not be true about them. And that’s why we get stuck with swiping every day and not getting results.”

The sisters wanted to develop an algorithm that made matches based on something deeper. Shared interests are definitely important and a great jumping-off point for a relationship, but they aren’t the real substance for a long-lasting connection.

All algorithms are making educated guesses about who you may like. Yanina and Viktoryia, however, supercharged their algorithm with an AI-powered face-reading system to better predict who you’re most likely to build a happy relationship with.

AI Personality Report Based on Facial Features

Every match on SciMatch starts with your selfie. “During registration, you scan your face,” Yanina explained. “The AI uses this scan to give you a personality report. It’s like a snapshot of your personality, and you have the chance to agree or disagree with what the AI suggests.”

Eighty-seven percent of SciMatch users report agreement with their AI-generated personality report, which Yanina and Viktoryia take as a sign they’re headed toward a more comprehensive online dating approach. “Of course, the higher the better,” Viktoryia added.

After you’ve scanned your face and received your personality report, SciMatch will present you with highly compatible profiles. 

“You go on the app, and we present all the potential matches you might like,” Yanina said. “The initial algorithm suggests these matches based on your preferences, but with our proprietary AI face-reading technology, you can assess how well someone you’re interested in would be for building a smooth, happy relationship.”

SciMatch learns about you the more you use it. As you browse profiles, the app will give you a compatibility score. Yanina said the score is a percentage, and each score will come with a breakdown of why the users got that score. 

Plenty of apps give you compatibility ratings, but not all of them give you a breakdown of the numbers.

“We give you a sneak peek of a potential relationship, the potential challenges in your relationship, the good stuff about your relationship if you’re over 50% compatible,” Yanina said. “The compatibility score shouldn’t be the end-all-be-all of if you date this person, but they’re good to be aware of.”

The app is driven by mutual matches, meaning you’ll browse profiles and get to chat and connect with people you like who like you back.

But, if you and another user in your filter ranges have a compatibility score higher than 90%, you can browse their profiles without a mutual match. Viktoryia said, “If you’re highly compatible, we don’t want you to have to depend on a mutual like to connect.”

SciMatch’s AI is a central aspect of the app. Yanina and Viktoryia said they want users to find their own balance between personal choice and relying on the tech. “The final decision always lies in your hands,” Yanina told us. “We want you to explore, and what we give you is like the guide.”

Two Years of Successful Matching

SciMatch has only been around for two years, but in that time it’s made a huge impact. “We’re getting absolutely overwhelmingly positive feedback from users,” Yanina said. “We’re getting lots of emails saying they’re having the most meaningful conversations they’ve ever had on dating apps.”

Viktoryia can provide a personal testimony to SciMatch’s efficacy: She herself met her boyfriend on the app.

“I found a guy on SciMatch,” she told us. “We’ve already been together for a year and a half. And it’s easily the best and healthiest relationship I’ve ever had in my life.”

SciMatch is for serious daters, but that doesn’t mean we can’t have a little fun along the way. The app has two features that let you have some fun with AI and make meaningful connections while you do it. The Celebrity Crush feature lets you upload a picture of your celebrity crush to SciMatch.

SciMatch offers another cool AI tool to analyze your celebrity crush and match you with users who have similar facial features. 

“You can check compatibility with your celebrity crush recommendations,” Yanina explained. “We don’t undermine the aspect of visual attraction in online dating, but we still want to consider a lot of aspects of chemistry and personality.”

Yanina and Viktoryia are excited to see how AI tech like theirs will transform the dating industry. “AI is going to change everything,” Yanina said. “Not only in the safety sphere but also in the way AI is going to help us find and build relationships that are really healthy and long-lasting.”