How Long Does a Bumble Spotlight Last?

A Bumble Spotlight lasts 30 minutes. Bumble's own Boost page says it sends your page to the top of other daters' stacks for that half hour, so more potential matches in your area see you while it runs. That is how long it works and how long it stays active. It is a short burst, not an evening and not a day.

You start a Spotlight by tapping the Spotlight option on the main menu, under your photo. From that tap, the half hour runs on its own.

Bumble calls it a single-use consumable, so treat the half hour as spent the moment you tap it. If you close the app after five minutes, you have still used the Spotlight.

Nothing about you changes. Your photos, your answers and your age are the same as they were a minute earlier. The only difference is that Bumble puts you in front of more people in your area for those 30 minutes.

That means a Spotlight multiplies whatever you already have. A strong first photo gets seen by more women who like what they see. A weak one gets rejected by more women, faster.

When it ends, you go back to being shown the way you were before. Bumble describes the boost as lasting for a set period, and it does not describe any lasting effect after that.

The matches you picked up do not disappear with it. Each one is a normal match with its own clock, and Bumble gives both people 72 hours from matching to send an opening message or the match expires. So the real work starts when the Spotlight stops, and it is yours to finish.

Boost and Premium include a small weekly allowance of Spotlights, and Premium+ includes more. They expire and replenish on the weekday your subscription was first bought, so an unused one is lost at the next refresh.

If you have one sitting there and the refresh day is close, use it on an evening when you are free. Letting it lapse is the one way to get nothing from it.

Because the half hour is fixed, prepare first. A few minutes of setup changes what you get out of it.

• Put your best photo first, because it is the one most of those extra women will judge you on.
• Make sure you have nothing waiting on you for the next hour.
• Charge your phone and turn notifications on, so new matches do not sit unseen.
• Think of two or three kinds of opening line you can adapt quickly.

a dating coach's belief is that an app only has so many fresh people to show you, so running boosts back to back returns less each time. Leave a gap between Spotlights rather than spending them all in one week.

Start it when your phone is in your hand and you have nothing else on. Matches arrive close together, and a man at a long dinner is a man who answers them hours late.

While it runs, answer each new match as it appears with one specific thing from her page and one easy question. a dating coach's point about online dating is that a message built on something she can answer, a detail in her photos or her answers, gets a reply where a "hey" does not.

A good Spotlight is not the one that brings in the most matches. It is the one where you answered every woman who came in, and at least one of those chats is moving toward a plan.

If you got five matches and wrote to all five with something specific, you did the half hour properly. If you got fifteen and wrote "hey" to each, you spent the Spotlight and kept nothing.

If women rarely like you back, a Spotlight will mostly show you to more women who rarely like you back. Fix the lead photo first, change one thing at a time, and test.

a dating coach's rule is to tweak, test and keep what works. A Spotlight is a fine test, because it gives you more views in a short, clean window. Count what came in. How many matches, how many answered, how many turned into a plan. That tells you whether the 30 minutes was worth spending.