Two women appear on my screen. I click the one I prefer. Another pair appears. I choose again. The faces themselves are varied. I am mostly asked to rate young adult women, and there’s a visible mix of ethnicities, hairstyles, aesthetics and photographic styles: polished dating-app portraits alongside perfectly ordinary phone selfies. They looked, for the most part, like ordinary internet users.
It has been a long time since I last swiped right on a stranger. I am in a relationship, and dating apps – I hope – are firmly out of bounds. But in the 14 years since Tinder launched, more than 350 million have logged on to look for love. Out of these, roughly 23 million people have paid for the privilege.
Now a new website, launched this summer, wants to extract even more from this swiping experience. Study of Us, created by the American sex researcher, former sex worker and controversial internet personality who goes by the alias Aella, invites users to choose between pairs of faces to discover their own “attractiveness” score.
Cindy Crawford’s son Presley Gerber dies in rehab aged 27
Presley Gerber, the son of supermodel Cindy Crawford and Rande Gerber, has died at the age of 27.
The former model died on Sunday at a rehab facility, according to the Los Angeles county medical examiner. The cause of death has not been disclosed.
A closer look at the detail
Gerber, who was the eldest child of the celebrity couple, and brother of model Kaia Gerber, had spoken openly about his mental health and drug use in recent years.
His sister mentioned his “decade-long struggle with drug addiction” in the September 2026 issue of .
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Mental health struggles
Having struggled with mental health, depression and some other things that come along with that, I think that whether I help one person or a hundred people get out of that place that I was in at one point in my life, that’s all I need to do.
Speaking to podcast in 2023, Gerber hoped that sharing his story would help others suffering with mental health issues.
Life in the limelight
- Gerber had been a model like his mother and younger sister Kaia, making his runway debut for Italian label Moschino aged just 16.
- He went on to model for brands including Burberry, Dolce & Gabbana, and Bottega Veneta.
- Gerber posted a video about undergoing drug withdrawal treatment in the months before his death, though the cause of his death was not disclosed.
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Family asks for privacy
- Allie Jenkins, a representative for Crawford and her husband Rande Gerber, told : “The family is asking for privacy during this very difficult and painful time.”
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All the latest Earl Spencer revelations as royal row continues
A war of words has broken out after Earl Spencer made a series of damning claims about the King in a new memoir about his sister, Diana, Princess of Wales.
Swan Song: Diana, My Sister is due to be published on Tuesday. Here are some key claims made in excerpts from the book released so far.
‘We’ll forget her soon enough’
Spencer claims he and Charles argued over arrangements for his sister’s funeral in 1997 and the King told him: “Rest assured, we’ll forget her soon enough”.
Spencer has also said he believes the relationship between the press and the Duke and Duchess of Sussex “echoes” the way the media treated his sister.
Other key claims made
- Spencer has written of how Charles’s phone call following the car crash in 1997 “sounded strangely matter-of-fact”.
- “[Charles] sounded giddily elated – like a lottery winner, I remember thinking at the time,” Spencer writes.
- In another extract, Spencer told of his memories of the funeral, and his concern for Harry, after he observed a “lack of obvious care”.
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While we do not comment on books as a matter of principle, His Majesty is mindful that the pain of fraternal grief can cloud reason, affect judgment and colour memory in ways others do not recognise, even many years after such a loss.
Buckingham Palace spokesman
King accused of gaslighting
Spencer has accused the King of gaslighting him and called his response a “rather poor imitation of the ‘recollections may vary’ quote” – the late Queen’s response to the Duke and Duchess of Sussex’s allegations in their Oprah Winfrey interview, The Mail on Sunday reports.
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Watch more from The i Paper
Badenoch pledges to bring back tax-free shopping for tourists
Kemi Badenoch has promised to revive a tax-free shopping scheme for tourists by reversing a post-Brexit rule change.
The decision to scrap the VAT refund scheme for international visitors in 2021 left the UK “less competitive” than many other European holiday destinations as the country left the EU, the Tories said.
Business chiefs hail ‘pro-growth’ policy change
Badenoch said the policy was letting down businesses.
Business chiefs, including the bosses of Fortnum & Mason and Paul Smith, hailed the policy change as “pro-growth” and “pro-jobs”.
Losing out to ‘rival cities’
We have iconic retailers, inventive designers and brilliant manufacturers, but they are being let down by a tax policy that is chasing their customers away. Holidaymakers are choosing rival cities in other countries for the simple reason that it saves them money.
Kemi badenoch, lEADER OF THE CONSERVATIVE PARTY
A closer look at the detail
- Spending by visitors remains 8 per cent lower than before the pandemic – despite numbers returning to pre-Covid levels, according to 2024 estimates from tourism agency VisitBritain.
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Treasury: ‘UK visitors can claim VAT’
Almost every European country offers tax-free shopping for tourists, except the UK – although the minimum spend varies.
A Treasury spokesperson said “visitors can still claim VAT relief where the items purchased are shipped directly to their home country as exports” and that it is working to “welcome 50 million international visitors a year to the UK by 2030”.
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How to be more grateful for daily life in five easy steps
The world feels like a difficult place at the moment, and it can feel very hard sometimes to find things to be thankful for; when we are overwhelmed, we have less capacity to notice and reflect on the good things. Yet, ironically, proactively cultivating gratitude is one of the things that can actually help us feel less stressed.
NHS GP dR RADHA
The science
Research has shown that feeling or expressing thanks can actually alter our brain.
- The balance of neurotransmitters change; more serotonin and dopamine (feel good chemicals) are produced.
- This can be long lasting if we make gratitude a regular habit.
- We also get a decrease in our cortisol (stress hormone) levels which helps lower anxiety.
- Being grateful can strengthen the nerve pathways which triggers positive emotion.
How can we build gratitude?
Change your words
Instead of seeing something as a problem, try to see the opportunities within it.
Our brains are very receptive and what we read or write can alter our emotional system.
Express it
This will not only make you feel good, but you will also get a positive response from others.
How can we build gratitude?
Notice more
Throughout your day, try to notice all the things that are going well; has someone opened a door for you, or smiled?
The basics
By being thankful for the small things every day, we are far more likely to be and stay healthy so that we can enjoy them.
What to do
Gratitude can lead to feelings of optimism, lower our blood pressure, and improve sleep quality.
- Write down what potential good aspects there are to the things you don’t feel like doing, or even what could be worse about it.
- Spend a few minutes writing down three things that you are looking forward to that day, or the good things that have happened to you that day.
- Say thank you to yourself for the things you have achieved, or managed to get through and changed that day.
Sales of battery
electric vehicles hit a record high last year.
Starts at £22,995 for the smaller battery
Available with either a 40kWh battery or a larger 52kWh pack, that offers almost 255 miles, the latest, retro-inspired Renault 5 is both a joy to behold and a hoot to drive.
The interior has been lavished with a level of detail that’s typically reserved for more expensive cars.
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A champion of EV efficiency
It offers a remarkable 491 mile range on a single charge from the 85kWh battery.
It is a technological masterclass inside with the ability to option screens that span the entire width of the dashboard, including an optional display for the front passenger.
Priced from £37,400
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It’s a lot of money to part with, but this is arguably all the car you will ever need.
The £89,000 Macan is a premium SUV that somehow manages to blend Porsche’s reputation for dynamics and sporty driving with everyday practicality.
The 95kWh batteries can go from 10 to 80 per cent in as little as 21 minutes from the fastest public charging outlets.
With the business class-style six seat configuration costing a staggering £76,995, it is by far the most expensive Kia ever made, but it backs up its financial demands with a suite of genuinely useful and impressive onboard technology.
It’s fast, goes a long way between stops and charges relatively quickly but the interior is bland, the onboard technology is infuriating and the experience is devoid of emotion.
All of its gadgetry can’t disguise the fact that performance is weak, even for a typically zippy EV, the ride is fussy at slower speeds and it’s not in the least bit enjoyable to drive on a country road.
- While good value (prices start at £17,935) for the 200-mile max range, there are more interesting options from Hyundai, Citroen and Renault for similar money.
- It attempts to wow with tech, much of which hinders, rather than helps.
- There’s no tangible benefit over mounting your phone to the dash.
- Simply an average driving experience, adequate range and slow charging speeds.
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The kitchen gadgets under £25
Victorinox paring knife
It’s comfortable to hold, with a point sharp enough for scoring pastry.
ProCook cast iron pan
For unbeatable searing and heat-retention, cast iron is the top choice.
Tesco chopping board
Priced at just £22, I’ve yet to find another board that matches it for sheer value and quality.
The kitchen gadgets under £25
Pyrex jug
It is the perfect vessel for blending smooth sauces, melting butter, or warming stock. It won’t stain like plastic and the red measurements never fade.
Salter scales
“I’ve had my slim little set of Salter Disc Scales for over a decade, and I’m delighted to see they are still made to exactly the same reliable design today.”
Microplane grater
It uses photo-etched stainless steel teeth that stay razor-sharp for a decade, something the lookalike copycats simply can’t match.
Braun hand-held blender
It’s an essential for everything from making velvety soup to getting the lumps out of white sauce.
Bodum cafetiere
As well as delivering great results, cafetieres are easy to clean and there’s no ongoing filter paper costs or pod recycling to deal with.
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The kitchen gadgets under £25
Oxo peeler
What truly sets it apart is the chunky, rubberised handle that absorbs pressure and stays completely non-slip, even if your hands are wet. It is inexpensive and incredibly durable.
Falcon pie dish
Made by fusing porcelain onto heavy-gauge steel for smooth durability, it is dishwasher, freezer, hob, air-fryer and oven-safe.
The golden rules for a happy, secure relationship
Psychiatrist and neuroscientist Dr Amir Levine, author of bestselling book , explains why we behave the way we do in love.
Golden rules for happy relationships
Start with your own behaviours
The foundation of a secure, connected life is being what I call CARRP: that means being consistent, available, responsive, reliable and predictable. All of these qualities can be enacted in small gestures every day.
Express your needs
People need consistency and connection to feel safe. This is not, ‘You hurt my feelings by never replying to me’, it’s more ‘this is the kind of contact that helps me feel secure’.
Golden rules for happy relationships
The appendix ‘inflammation’ rule
If a relationship repeatedly inflames your nervous system, you need to disengage and deprioritise it.
Lean on community
You don’t need hundreds of friends. You need people and places that regularly remind you that you belong.
Stop blaming childhood
Humans are much more complicated than: ‘this happened to you, therefore you are doomed to be anxious’.
Reach for a
secure script
When something unsettles you in a relationship, your first reaction is not always the most accurate one.
If you’re anxious, your brain may jump very quickly to: ‘this is the beginning of the end’. If you’re avoidant, your brain may say: ‘this person wants too much from me, I need to get away’. So one very practical thing you can always do is pause and ask: ‘What would a secure person do here?’
Loneliness elsewhere
When people talk about loneliness, they often assume it means you don’t have enough people in your life. But you can be surrounded by people and still feel lonely if those relationships leave you feeling excluded, ignored or disconnected.
What to do
- Build a community that works for your temperament and gives you regular, reliable moments of connection.
- You can still be kind to people while not treating them as someone who belongs in your inner circle.
- Explain what you need. Sometimes people simply don’t realise how you are experiencing them.
- Check in with people: does this person actually feel that I’m reliable? Do they experience me as predictable? That’s the only way that you can start to become more secure.
Do some foods leave
you feeling hungry rather than satiated? Experts say there are…
Foods that leave you hungrier
A bowl of cereal and glass of orange juice
More refined cereals are digested quickly, and fruit juice, whilst one of your five-a-day, contains less fibre than whole fruit. This might mean you find yourself hungry again within 1-2 hours of eating this breakfast.
Swap the orange juice for a whole orange, the cereal for oats and milk or serve it with Greek yoghurt or a boiled egg. This would increase the fibre and protein content; two nutrients strongly linked with fullness.
Foods that leave you hungrier
These pastries are made primarily from refined flour and butter, and are relatively low in protein and fibre.
Toast and jam
Shop-bought packs can contain a lot of white rice, which is digested quickly, and the protein content is often modest.
Foods that leave you hungrier
Vegetable soup
On its own, it is often very low in protein and calories, so hunger can return quickly.
Unless it’s loaded with veggies, it’s probably pretty low in fibre.
Liquids are generally less filling as they require little chewing which may not trigger satiety signals.
Foods that leave you hungrier
Snack bars
They are ideal for a quick pick-me-up, but if reducing hunger is what you’re after, it’d be better to swap it out.
Low-fat yoghurt
A full-fat plain Greek yoghurt with berries and seeds tends to be much more filling due to the protein, fat and fibre.
On an empty stomach, it can actually increase your appetite.
What to eat instead
Instead of thinking about avoiding foods, think about what you can add to them.
- Add beans, lentils or shredded chicken to your vegetable soup and pasta.
- Thicken your smoothies with Greek yoghurt, chia seeds and oats.
- Apple slices with peanut butter, yogurt with berries and hummus with oat biscuits are better snack options than a pre-made snack bar.
- Have alcohol alongside a balanced meal containing protein and fibre.
The premise is simple. Upload your photograph and strangers will rate you in return. Accumulate enough “credits” by swiping and the site promises to tell you not only how attractive people find you, but what sorts of people are particularly keen on you. Rating 10 pairs of women earns one credit. There are also small rewards for quizzes and “guessing rounds” involving politics, net worth, dominance and “body count” (the number of people you’ve had sex with).
I chose the cheaper option. By the time I unlocked my final report, I had rated well over a thousand pairs of faces. I had to rate so many people that my thumbs started to ache; by the end, it felt as though I had judged a sea of strangers. I wouldn’t say it was an especially edifying sensation.
After several days of tapping, I finally accumulated the 300 credits required to unlock the grandly titled “Big Report”. The verdict was rather kinder than I had feared. Of 133 people who had seen my photograph, 62 per cent of women had chosen me, compared with 47 per cent of men.
I was unusually divisive: reactions to my photograph were more sharply split than reactions to 76 per cent of the photos on the site. In other words, this was not a difference between men and women; raters as a whole disagreed about my face more than they did about most.
Age was even more revealing. Only 40 per cent of women aged 18 to 24 picked me, rising to 63 per cent among 25-to-34-year-olds and 72 per cent among women aged 35 to 44. At 43, I decided to take this as a victory.
Study of Us also identifies your “fans”: people disproportionately likely to choose your photograph. An early readout described mine as mostly women, with a median age of 25, and said they tended to favour white, older, taller and more socially conservative-looking men. Aella thinks identifying the demographic for whom you particularly appeal is more useful than obsessing over a single beauty score.
During the days I spent swiping, I was asked to decide which of two people presented to me had slept with more people, who was richer, who was more politically conservative, who was more dominant. A lot of the time I was simply guessing, and guessing as quickly as possible, because the point was to rack up credits.
But after a while I began developing shortcuts. When trying to work out somebody’s net worth or sexual history, I increasingly found myself choosing the more conventionally attractive person. It felt as though my scores were improving.
There is at least some logic to this. Economists have long identified a “beauty premium” in the labour market: good-looking people can enjoy advantages in earnings and employment. Wealth itself can also leave traces in teeth, grooming, clothes and the surroundings in which a photograph is taken. Attractive people may likewise enjoy more sexual opportunities.
Yet, when Study of Us eventually totted up my guesses, I was only 52 per cent accurate on net worth and 51 per cent on body count: barely better than tossing a coin.
Eventually the site began assembling what amounted to a statistical dossier on my desires. Apparently I leaned towards younger-looking and slimmer women. At one stage, it informed me that I was unusually attracted to narcissists; after several hundred more choices, I was apparently unusually likely to avoid them. My supposed preferences also extended to political outlook, kinkiness, dominance, mental illness and pornography consumption.
And yet, since the site launched, a sea of users have flocked to test out their own face. Tom, 31 from London, was one of them. “I was immediately interested in the website because it claimed to provide an actual, accurate, data-led answer to the question that I constantly ask myself: am I actually attractive?” he says. “Obviously my partner and my friends say I’m attractive, but there’s a niggling doubt there.”
Tom quickly became hooked on the site. “What I didn’t expect was how addictive it became – I initially convinced myself I ‘wasn’t taking it seriously’ and uploaded one hasty selfie. When the results came in, and it was only being picked by 60 per cent of users, the facade of ‘I’m not taking this seriously’ immediately wilted away, and I uploaded four more pictures and started frantically engaging with the site.”
This sits in stark contrast to dating apps – which, Tom believes, do the same thing, but in hidden, private algorithms. “Dating apps are just cynical enough to be wrapped up in inspirational marketing about exploration, adventure, finding your soulmate and living happily ever after.”
Online looksmaxxing culture is full of this desire for certainty: jaw angles, height, symmetry and “mate value”. Men can become fixated on supposedly objective rules about what women want, even when those preferences are partly being exaggerated by competition between men themselves.
This terminology, originating from Incel communities, has become an obsession in some darker spaces of the internet, with men going to extremes to improve their “sexual market value”. Leg lengthening surgery has become increasingly popular, while young men on TikTok seek out easy ways to achieve the perfect chiselled jaw (believed to be one of the laws of looksmaxxing).
Dr Anda Solea, who researches incel and looksmaxxing spaces, says the language of science is important. Calling something a score, or presenting it as a graph begins to look empirically proven.
Aella herself is relaxed about the looksmaxxing comparison. “I am pro-looksmaxxing,” she tells me. She has undergone cosmetic surgery and points out, reasonably enough, that going to the gym is itself a way of improving your appearance.
But she is less interested in telling users how to become universally desirable than in showing them how particular photographs are read. Most of us, she says, are simply ordinary-looking people who nonetheless fall in love, marry and live perfectly happy lives.
“I may not be the hottest person,” she says, describing the mentality she hopes users will adopt, “but there’s going to be somebody out there who thinks that I’m really hot.” There is something quite reassuring about this.
It seems there’s an enormous amount that we think we know from a face, not to mention the curious authority we grant a judgement once it has been converted into a percentage. A face can contain many clues. The trouble begins when we mistake those clues for something actually insightful.