This dating service is strictly online and doesn’t have a smartphone app for easy mobile use. The website layout also looks cluttered and less modern than some of the other websites we looked at. It does, however, give you free access to user photos without having to pay for a subscription.
Chemistry has a comprehensive signup process, asking not only what you’re like as a person but what you want in a mate. The first question is what your hand looks like: is your pointer finger longer than your ring finger? Is your ring finger about as long as your middle finger? While this question isn’t explained and we couldn’t find any scholarly articles to back it up, some websites, including the Huffington Post, have published pieces about how the length of a person’s fingers correlates with their personality.
Other questions you answer for your profile include physical traits like your height, hair color and build. For more in-depth personality questions, it forces you to choose between two options rather than letting you choose on a sliding scale. Our reviewers didn’t like this because not everything is black or white. For instance, one question asks whether you are community-oriented or not, and doesn’t give you any other answer to choose from. People who feel they fall somewhere in the middle wouldn’t know which one to select. Other sites, like eharmony, give you a scale so you can be precise in your answers. The whole process takes about 10 minutes though and was one of the faster profiles in our lineup to set up, particularly among web-only services.
All three of the fake profiles we created got five matches each in 24 hours. This limited number of matches was among the smallest selections we got from any dating service, which was sort of nice because it made us consider them more closely. Similar to Tinder, you can scroll through user profiles and “like” them without a subscription.
One downside to this site is you can’t send messages without paying for a subscription. You can, however, send simple “flirts” and see who has viewed your profile free of charge. While being able to send a flirt is nice, it’s also frustrating because if you get one back, the only next step is to pay for a subscription so you can actually exchange messages with that person. Our three profiles received an average of two messages in 24 hours, and as we didn’t pay for a subscription, we couldn’t read them. A subscription is also required to see who is interested in you, to get access to instant messaging and to access other search and match features.
Blocking and reporting inappropriate users is easy on this site. Removing your profile is also easy to do when you do find love. Overall, this site’s design and features didn’t impress, us but they do work for basic matchmaking.
