Lulu: Is He Your #MrRight

So you met a cute boy at the dance last night who is #adorable and somehow his phone number ended up in your phone. Before sending him that winky face, maybe you should log onto LuLu and check out his profile!

Lulu is an app that accesses a girl’s friends list via her Facebook profile. From there, Lulu creates rating profiles for all of the boys a girl may know. The app allows girls to state their relationship to the male in question: friend (#bffs), crush, hook-up (#goneinthemorning), ex-girlfriend, or girlfriend and then rate the guy on a scale 4-10 for a variety of categories including humor, ambition, commitment, appearance, and sex. Boys are then given a composite score based on girls’ individual ratings. The Lulu profile also includes a list of hashtags for every guy such as #motherslovehim #nerdybutilikeit #bedroomeyes, or the not-so-positive #mamasboy #wanderingeye #workinprogress #manchild.

Lulu seems like a girl’s dream. It’s rich with #topsecret #intel that other females have collected on the guy you might be interested in. Lulu is also a platform to warn other girls about the potential dangers of that guy. What could go wrong?! Well, a lot. As you might have guessed, Lulu can serve as a grilling ground for angry ex-girlfriends set on slandering the boys who broke their hearts. Also, many times girls create fake ratings to boost their friends’ scores. But more troubling than these issues is the premise of Lulu itself.

I walked into my first day of Spanish class this semester and immediately recognized two of the boys in my class, who I had never met before, based on their Lulu profiles (#awkward). One had an impressive 8.6 but the other had a meager 5.3 overall score, #ouch. I found myself thinking about their Lulu profiles when I should have been trying to get to know them in person. Every boy deserves a chance, and if you already have preconceived notions about what he may be like based on a silly Internet app, then you might miss out on being friends with or even dating a really cool guy, which would be a #bummer. So go ahead and send that flirty text. Get to know the cute boy personally before checking out his Lulu score. Who knows? He could turn out to be #mrright.