Why Is Hinge Face Check Not Working?

Face Check usually fails for one of a few reasons: poor light, something covering part of your face, or photos on your page that give the scan nothing clear to match. Hinge's advice is to exit the scan and start again with your face well lit and fully visible, no sunglasses or hat, and a neutral expression. It also says to keep group, altered and filtered photos off your page.

Face Check is the required video selfie Hinge uses in some regions to confirm you are a real person, estimate your age and check your photos. Until you pass it, Hinge says you cannot use Discover, cannot send likes, and cannot use many of its core features.

For a man who opens Hinge to send likes, that is most of the app. So a scan that will not go through is worth ten minutes of care now rather than a week of half-hearted retries.

Light is the first thing to check, because Hinge asks for a face that is well lit and fully visible.

Men tend to try the scan wherever they happen to be holding their phone. The sofa at night under one ceiling bulb. The car. The office, with a bright window behind the head. Overhead light puts your eyes in shadow. A window behind you turns your face into a dark shape against a bright background.

Stand facing a window in daylight instead, so the light falls on your face rather than behind it. If it is evening, face the brightest lamp in the room. a dating coach gives the same advice for the photos that sell you on the apps: your face well lit and well framed. The scan wants exactly what a good photo wants.

Hinge's list here is plain: no sunglasses, no hats, nothing that covers your face.

Men tend to read that narrowly. A cap pulled low counts. So does a hood, hair falling across your eyes, a hand resting on your chin, or a thumb creeping into the corner of the camera. If you wear glasses and the scan keeps going wrong, it costs nothing to try once without them.

Hold the phone at eye level, about an arm's length away, and follow the instructions on screen. Tilting the phone up from your chest gives the camera a view of your nostrils, not your face.

Hinge asks for a neutral expression, and this is the one that trips up men who are good at photos.

You have probably learned to smile, raise your eyebrows or give the camera a look. For the scan, drop all of it. Relax your face, keep your mouth closed and look at the screen the way you would look at a menu. The scan is comparing your face with your photos, and it has an easier job when your face is at rest.

Face Check does not only look at the video. It checks the photos on your page, and Hinge says to avoid group, altered and filtered photos there.

If your page is three group shots, a filtered selfie and a picture from a wedding six years ago, the scan has a hard time finding you in any of them. So do women. a dating coach tells men that a group shot in which she has to guess which man is you is a wasted slot, and that a photo taken from too far away should be cropped or cut.

The fix is at least one recent, unfiltered photo of you alone, with your face taking up a good part of the frame. Put it first. Then run the scan again.

Follow Hinge's own advice and exit the scan fully, then start a fresh attempt. Do not keep fighting an attempt that has already gone wrong.

Change one thing each time. Move to better light. Take off the cap. Swap in a clearer lead photo. Three careful tries in good conditions beat fifteen quick ones in the same dark room, because the fifteenth try in bad light fails for the same reason as the first.

Never try to get around the scan with an old photo, a picture of a screen or someone else's face. Face Check is built to catch exactly that, and working around it is not something Hinge's rules allow.

Every day the scan sits unfinished is a day your likes are not going out, and every chat you had going sits idle on your side.

There is a bigger upside too. The changes that get you through Face Check are the ones most men needed anyway: a clear, well lit, solo photo of your face at the front of the set. a dating coach's view is that your photos do most of the work on any dating app. A scan that forces you to fix the first one may end up doing more for your results than it cost you in time.