The worst thing about love in the time of Tinder is navigating your way through all the plebs out there, amirite?
This grievous problem only multiples tenfold if you are famous, hot, famous-for-being-hot, or otherwise desirable thanks to your strong artistic talents. It’s a jungle out there, no doubt about it.
The answer, of course, is an elite Tinder. A private member’s club. A fight club, secret by its very nature but instead of belting the crap out of each other in a basement, you go on dates and tag each other on Instagram.
Enter: Raya, a secret dating app for the famous whose members reportedly include Flume, Cara Delevingne, Ruby Rose, Diplo, Phoebe Dahl, Patrick Schwarzenegger, Avicii, Bonnie Wright, Hannibal Buress, Alexander Wang, and any number of Victoria’s Secret models. It’s been described as ‘Illuminati Tinder’, and keeps its lips so tightly locked that since its launch in March last year, only a handful of articles have been written about it.
In fact, if you try and screenshot anyone’s Raya profile, you’ll receive a message threatening your excommunication from the app should the photo find its way online.
To get in, you need to have a strong Instagram presence. That’s the baseline. You also need to pretty much be recommended by a current member of the Raya community, as both their recommendation and the number of Raya members who follow you on Instagram will be heavy influences in your membership being approved.
“While there isn’t a specific set of qualifications for applications, we will rarely, if ever, consider an applicant who wasn’t referred by a current member of the Raya community,” says Raya on its website, which has just two pages: an about, and a contact.
If you pass muster, you’ll be able to start tapping hearts on a limited number of profiles a day, and set up a personal montage of photos. (The tune you pick to accompany said montage is another way to judge and be judged. Choose wisely.)
“There’s plenty of non-famous people on the app, too,” wrote NY Mag last year, after one of their writers spent three weeks on Raya before sacrificing her membership to write the story. “Artists, models, record-label employees, ad execs, photographers. Most had Instagram follower counts starting in the low thousands, or else were young and very attractive.”
Or, as a straight male member known to PEDESTRIAN.TV said: “It’s babe city.” (The app caters to all sexualities, but skews pretty straight.)
We’re hearing reports that the app is starting to gain traction in Australia. So if you’ve got some cred to your name, an agent’s email in your bio, a jel-worthy follow-to-follower Insta ratio, or just a face that everybody wants to sit on, download and get thirsty.
For everybody else, there’s Tinder.
Photo: Flume / Instagram.
