What Are Advanced Filters on Bumble?

Advanced Filters are the extra preference settings that come with Bumble Premium. They narrow down who appears in your People tab by more specific details than the basic filters cover, and Bumble lets you turn on as many of them as you want. The catch is that you can only filter on a detail you have filled in about yourself.

Every Bumble account gets the basic filters. Those cover age, distance, whether someone is verified, the languages she speaks, and shared interests. In the US and Canada you can also set ethnicity preferences. Distance is the one exception, since Bumble only offers it in certain countries.

Advanced Filters go further, into the details people add about how they live. Bumble's own example is smoking. If a woman who smokes is a dealbreaker for you, you can filter for non-smokers. The full list sits inside the Advanced Filters tab, and it is worth opening once just to see what is there.

They belong to Premium. Bumble's paid features page lists them among what Premium adds on top of Boost.

1. Open the People tab.
2. Tap the filters icon in the top right corner.
3. Choose the Advanced Filters tab.
4. Pick the ones you want to apply.

You can change them whenever you like, and there is no cap on how many you switch on. That second part is where men get into trouble.

Bumble only lets you filter on information you have added to your own profile. If you have never said whether you smoke, you cannot filter for women who do not.

This is fair, and it works in your favor if you take it seriously. The details you fill in are also the details she reads when she is deciding about you. If you want to screen women on a question, you should be willing to answer that same question yourself.

So before you touch the filters, go through the details section of your profile and fill in the parts you actually care about. Answer them honestly. A filter built on an answer you fudged will only bring you women who were expecting somebody else.

Bumble is direct about the cost. The more filters you apply, the fewer people you are likely to see in your People tab. If you pay for Premium, the same goes for your Liked You tab.

That second part matters more than it sounds. The Liked You tab is the first thing Bumble lists among Premium's additions. Heavy filtering thins it out at the same time, so you can end up paying for one feature and then using another to hide most of what it shows you.

Men who say Bumble has run out of women in their city have very often done it to themselves. Five preferences, each one reasonable, stacked until almost nobody fits all five at once.

The useful question for each filter is a simple one. Would you still go for a drink with a woman who did not fit it, if everything else about her was right?

If the answer is no, filter for it. That saves you from conversations you would have ended by the second reply anyway.

If the answer is "probably, yes," leave it off. Decide when you actually see her.

A quick way to sort this out is to write your list down before you open the tab. Put each preference in one of two columns: things you would walk away over, and things you would like but could live without. For most men the first column is short. Those are your filters. Everything in the second column is something you can judge from her photos and what she wrote, at the moment you are deciding on her anyway.

A setting can sort women by a fact. It cannot read a face, a smile, or a line she wrote about her weekend. You can, and you already do every time you decide which way to go on someone.

a dating coach makes the point that the women you choose to swipe right on decide the women you end up with. Be picky there, where you can see the whole person. Keep the settings for the few things you would never bend on.

Rarely. Filters make your deck smaller and more exact. They do not make any woman more likely to say yes to you, and they do nothing for a man whose real issue is too few matches.

Plenty of men refuse to pay for anything on the apps on principle. coach argues that is a mistake whenever your time is worth more than the fee. His advice is practical: test a paid feature, keep it if it changes your results, and drop it if it does not.

Apply that here. Try a month with one or two genuine dealbreakers switched on. If the women in your deck get closer to what you want and the deck stays full, the filters are earning their place. If it starts running dry, take filters off before you blame the app.