Kiwi pair lose beauty rating after 'chubby' Christmas

Two "beautiful" New Zealanders, who put on weight over Christmas, have been expelled from a social networking site that only lets "good-looking people" sign up after uploading their holiday snaps on the site.

Members decide on who is allowed to join beautifulpeople.com by voting on a photograph of an applicant and their brief profile.

They continue to rate uploaded photographs on the site and members who fall below a certain rating may be removed.

"We responded to complaints by moving the newly chubby members back to the rating stage," said the website's New Zealand-raised managing director, Greg Hodge.

"This is the same as having them reapply."

Spokesman for beautifulpeople.com Remy Le Fevre said the exercise to expel members was done to maintain the standard of the site, which was meant for only good-looking people.

But Mr Le Fevre said he was not able to say who the expelled Kiwis were.

"When they are expelled from the site, we lose the rights to all their personal information."

About 5000 New Zealanders have applied to join the site, but only around 1300 have been accepted, with the rest considered too ugly.

Mr Le Fevre said the website now had about 600,000 members worldwide.

Compared with more than 5000 members having been offloaded since Christmas, the number of expelled Kiwis showed that many New Zealanders were still taking pride in their looks over the summer holidays, he said.

He said the two expelled New Zealanders could reapply to join the site at any time, but their applications would again be submitted to the same rating process as every new applicant faced.

Most of those removed were from North America with nearly 900 from Britain.

- Lincoln Tan