You may remember that earlier this year, I made fun of the Chtristian Mingle ad on the left. I wrote of the model, “She looks like she is either the unfortunate victim of an evil plastic surgeon or the resident of a galaxy far far away.” Even Andrea told me that I was being mean, but the photo is super creepy.
Well, I didn’t think about it much after I published it. But just recently, I noticed that Tundra Hunden over at Tundra Talk brought up the subject. He wrote, “Is it just me or… Is the woman in that Christian Mingle banner kinda (ok really ) scary looking? The kind of scary where you see her without all 14lbs of makeup and have to break out your rusty Swiss Army knife and start sawing…” Mostly, the guys on the site thought it was just him. It wasn’t that they didn’t think she was scary; it was more just that they all agreed that they would have sex with pretty much anyone or anything.
But then Tundra Hunden came back, “HA! I am not alone. Not only that but I am only half the jerk that this guy is.” And he linked to my article. I’m always happy when people link to me, so call me a jerk all you want. Andrea, for one, agrees. But it was never my intention to put the woman down, just the ad. It is an extremely unflattering photo and I would think the people at Christian Mingle would have seen that.
Well, it turns out that the same model was used in other ads. And she isn’t unattractive at all. She has a very unusual look, but that isn’t necessarily a bad thing. The crew could have used her face to far better advantage. And they did, as you can see in this photo from the same ad campaign:

In this photo she looks down right fetching, like just a regular girl. Not to put too fine a point on it, she looks like the kind of girl that young Christians would be looking for. Now was that so hard? Why do they continue to use the “alien woman in prom dress trying to hypnotize you” photo?