Picture perfect

Hello there Tree-dwellers,

The recent article in the Metro, coupled with the kind praise and endless forwarding from our friends, has resulted in a hive of Tree populating activity.  We ruddy well love it we do!  Thank you, thank you all for spreading the word.

This gorgeous wave of applications has got me pondering very specifically about people’s profiles.  Needless to say, a key part of anyone’s calling card these days is their photo.   Thinking about my own choices for photos has sparked some guidelines, which I hope you find useful.

On an obvious note, it’s important that you can actually see your face, the whole of it and not just bits!  Sideways piccys particularly wind up our resident I.T. genius, Dan – he refers to them as ’siders’ – brilliant.  Even if you’re not a fan of your face, it’s yours and in any case, I’m sure it’s lovely really and you’re just being a bit silly!

I cannot stress this next point enough.  Please, please, please smile in your main photo.  When creating this site, we did a tonne of research into what makes a good profile.  Time and time again the golden rule for successful daters was that they displayed their pearly whites /cheeky grins in a friendly, approachable and fun invitation.

Also, and this is a goody too, make sure that in your lead pic you are looking directly at the camera.  It’s well known that good eye contact is a vital element of any flirtation, believe me when I say that this goes for online flirting too.  Being able to see your eyes will make it easy for people to form a connection with you, pretty important don’t you think?

Without becoming obsessive (and we totally understand that it’s easy to) think about what you are doing in the photo, what you are wearing and what this says about you.  We all want to appear attractive, sexy, fun loving and interesting, but that doesn’t mean that a half naked photo of you drunk at a fire-eating jamboree (fun as that is), will sell you in your best light.  Try to imagine what your ideal partner might look for in you and how you can use your photos to show these qualities.

Knowing that online daters value visuals, we have created a fancy image collage (basically click ‘enlarge all images’ on someone’s profile and you’ll see) to allow you to view people’s photos easily and clearly.  A good variety of full shots, head shots, daytime shots, night time shots, silly shots, serious shots etc, will only serve to enhance your profile and in so doing, make you more appealing to fellow Tree-members.  Not only that, but photo’s are excellent ice-breakers and might trigger a cosy conversation between you and someone else.

Go on, embrace your face and let the world know who you are through our delightful photo function!

Lots of love

Trish x