Are you man or woman enough?

Dating Service for Beautiful People only

Entry into BeautifulPeople.net is all in the eye of the beholders.

Officially launching Thursday, the networking site is the electronic equivalent of the junior high cafeteria, with the popular kids - i.e., members - voting on whether to offer seats to the hopeful hordes. Which means that unlike other online communities such as Friendster and Thefacebook, BeautifulPeople functions more like an invitation-only social club.

The criteria are shamelessly superficial: a recent photograph (bikinis and bare biceps encouraged) and body statistics. Is your six-pack more of a two-pack? The site also accepts "people with personal/professional qualities that stand out from the majority" - like "Sandhill," an entrepreneur with a goofy grin who says his income is $1 million-plus.

An applicant's photo and profile is posted for three days. Members grade candidates of the opposite sex (to avoid Mean Girls-style competition) on a four-point attractiveness scale, from "Yes! Certainly!!" to - ouch - "No! Not at all!"

Honest or horrifying, it's Mensa for the Chiclet-smile set.

"BeautifulPeople is the most genuine of all sites," says Robert Hintze, who started the cybercommunity in 2002 in his native Denmark and brought it to Britain in April. Today's culture is appearance-driven anyway, so "why not make a place for all these people so focused on looks?"

On the surface, "you go, 'Oh, this is so lame.' But in some ways it is a great marketing opportunity," says Charlene Li, principal analyst at Forrester Research, a technology/market research company. Whether you're actually beautiful is beside the point, Li says; it's more about attitude. "Frankly, if you're a (legitimately) beautiful person, I'm not sure you want to be exposed in this way."

Discrimination against the ugly was made famous by HotOrNot.com, where visitors scroll through photos of would-be Bo Dereks and assign scores of 1 to a perfect 10.

"We're getting people through that first hurdle," says BeautifulPeople managing director Greg Hodge.

Matchmakers at eHarmony.com, where a personality profile trumps a literal profile, aren't so sure that initial screening is necessary. "We have found that the inside is oftentimes more beautiful than the outside," spokeswoman Marylyn Warren says.

Hodge insists theirs is a democratic system. Because members decide who makes the cut, not some burly guy behind a velvet rope, "we're giving power back to the people."

But if at first you don't succeed, cap those teeth, inflate those breasts and try, try, try again - as many as 50 times, the number it took for one Danish woman to be deemed worthy. After three years of working out, her body got "really good-looking," Hintze says.