High profile dating app zaya

GETTY

This is the undemocratic premise behind Raya, the private dating app celebrities and creative types use to find love.

Launched without fanfare in March 2015 Raya – which means “heaven” in Bulgarian – is said to have a waiting list running into the “hundreds of thousands”.

In Raya-speak, being “waitlisted” is code for a polite rejection. So far only about 5,000 applicants are rumoured to have been considered cool enough to join the club, having been assessed by an anonymous committee as having sufficient infl uence and physical appeal.

The select few are said to have included model Cara Delevingne, Desperate Housewives’ star Teri Hatcher, Basic Instinct’s Sharon Stone, Lord Of The Rings actor Elijah Wood, and Matthew Perry of Friends fame – all of whom have been spotted on the app.

WIREIMAGE

It’s sort of cool to swipe past lesser celebs while drunkenly prowling for sex on your phone but you’re probably never going to sleep with those people. “Raya is full of C-list models, social-media managers, people named Wolf, people whose bios say

Karley Sciortino

But the latest high-profile name to look for love on the site is four times-married former supermodel Christie Brinkley, 64, whose 19-year-old daughter Sailor Brinkley Cook has also signed up.

“I haven’t been on a date in a couple of months,” Brinkley said in an interview this week.

“Sailor was trying Raya. She had matched with somebody famous and she thought it was hysterical so she was telling me about it.”

To which Brinkley told her daughter: “Oh my God, that’s so funny because I matched with him too. She goes, ‘Mum, come on. No, you can’t do that.’ I said, ‘Why? I mean, if that’s where everybody meets…’” 

GETTY

Nicknamed “Tinder for famous people” and “Illuminati Tinder” – the Illuminati being an Enlightenment-era secret society – Raya has been growing in popularity since a screenshot of 30-year-old Kelly Osbourne’s alleged profile was leaked six months after the site went live.

In the carefully curated world of Raya this sort of behaviour is punishable with a member’s “removal” from the site. But is love with the stars really to be found behind the secretive algorithms of the ultimate dating clique?

Some former users think not. “Essentially Raya is the ‘You can’t sit with us’ of dating apps,” writes Karley Sciortino in her blog Slutever.

“It’s sort of cool to swipe past lesser celebs while drunkenly prowling for sex on your phone but you’re probably never going to sleep with those people. Raya is full of C-list models, social-media managers, people named Wolf, people whose bios say things like ‘racing driver living between Monaco and Tokyo’ and a million dudes who claim to be successful fashion photographers.

“And while there’s a part of all of us that wants to be a VIP or get backstage… to participate in a system that prioritises status in intimate interactions seems like a step too far.” 

Before being assessed by the secret committee – the members of whom are anonymous even to each other – applicants are vetted by a computerised assessment of the quality of traffic on their Instagram account.

This bothers Sciortino. “It confuses wealth and status with creativity and coolness,” she says. “Raya says it values creative achievements but they’re not interested in all creative people – they are interested in a particular type of particularly uncreative creative people.”

She insists members follow a clear demographic. She says she can’t find, for example, “Jewish nerds who write for The Paris Review” – a literary magazine.

“Why? Because Raya is like high school, where the hierarchy of popularity is superficial and undeserved,” she insists. 

GETTY

According to Raya, there aren’t any specific qualifi cations for applicants per se but the app’s site notes that they “rarely, if ever, consider an applicant who wasn’t referred by a current member”.

The site was set up by Jesse Johnson, son of actor Don Johnson and the half-brother of actress Dakota Johnson, the star of Fifty Shades Of Grey.

Dakota, however, appears to want nothing to do with the endeavour.

“My brother has this dating app called Raya,” she said during a 2016 press tour. “It’s like, really exclusive and you have to be accepted. My brother started it with some other people. I have no idea how it works and I refuse to be a part of it.” 

Tinder's most attractive people

Tinder revealed to Cosmopolitan Magazine, the most right-swiped men and women on their app in the UK.

Detractors say successful applicants are admitted because they are conventionally attractive, have rich parents, hang out at the “right” places and wear the “right” clothes.

Raya, they insist, is based on something approaching mob mentality. Writer Sarah Nicole, 31, believes that this means the site gets people hooked on making choices based on peer approval rather than just because they like the look of them.

“On Raya you don’t have to be insecure about who you like because someone has already decided that they are good enough,” she says.

“It removes the ‘embarrassing’ element of desire… your choice has been pre-approved by other invisible people in this network of cool.”

One could argue that this is how celebrities have been finding love for generations.