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For 20 thrilling seconds over the shoulder of a Raya member, I have a keyhole view of the dating app for A-listers, and, oh my word, it’s fun. First, there’s a Hollywood actor, aged around 33 – not that hot, but very talented. Wasn’t he up for an Oscar? But he lives in LA, and we don’t.
Next up: is that a football player? Actually, I hate football. ‘X’ him (because an X and a heart are Raya’s version of left and right swipes). Ooh, who is this DJ-I’ve-vaguely-heard- of? Look what fun he’s having in his profile picture. Is he at a club in Ibiza? Next! A-ha! This one has a nut-brown tan, laughing off the world’s cares on his yacht.
And as I laugh with him, the Raya app is minimised on my friend’s iPhone, and the fun disappears like cocaine down the plughole in a police raid. ‘I can’t show you any more,’ she says. ‘I’ll be thrown out.’ Because Raya is all about secrecy and exclusivity. It is a dating app for those ‘too famous’ to mix with civilians.
Since it launched in March 2015, the names of a few members have been leaked to the media. Among them:Cara Delevingne and Samantha Ronson (ex of Lindsay Lohan and DJ sister of Mark), plus Harry Potter actress Bonnie Wright and, just recently, JLaw’s ex Nicholas Hoult. Americans who’ve been on it include Patrick Schwarzenegger, Elijah Wood, Zach Braff, Matthew Perry, Teri Hatcher, John Cusack and the designer Alexander Wang.
After Kelly Osbourne’s profile was exposed online in August 2015, Raya introduced a banner that popped up when users tried to take a screenshot, threatening expulsion from the app if the picture appeared anywhere public.
Although the members I spoke to were discreet, all admitted they’d been shocked by how high-profile some of the applicants were. ‘There’s a weird number of actors and musicians,’ said one male member in LA. And then there are the directors, writers, agents, photographers, models and yogis – people the Raya founders describe as ‘in the creative industries’ – as well as, more recently, football and basketball players and Sports Illustratedmodels.
So who’s behind Raya? Only one is named: PR man Mike McGuiness, founder of the LA-based Co-Op Agency. My repeated requests for an interview, via an intermediary, with the anonymous ‘guys who run it’ were denied. ‘They won’t talk to the media. They won’t even give off-the-record background,’ I was told.
However, the online channel Amuse has quoted ‘a founder’ as saying: ‘We don’t want anyone knowing who made this or how it was created. We believe that tears away at the integrity of the committee. We simply want Raya to have just popped out of nowhere and quietly throw the best party on the internet. To do so, this means that unfortunately we cannot include everyone – especially people who would gossip or “out” some of our members.’
So far, the strategy of silence has been winning. Raya has been described as ‘Tinder for the Illuminati’ and compared to Fight Club (as in: ‘The first rule of Fight Club is you do not talk about Fight Club’). Those on it feel ‘chosen’, as if for some virtual Vanity Fair Oscars party.
Raya has been described as ‘Tinder for the Illuminati’ and compared to Fight Club (as in: The first rule of Fight Club is you do not talk about Fight Club)
And indeed they are chosen. Recommended by an existing member (or three) and vetted by a ‘committee’, which, with the help of an algorithm, trawls Instagram accounts (and, one assumes, a billion bikinied selfies) to make sure that if applicants are not A-list and obvious, they are at least popular and good-looking. ‘There are a lot of what you’d call “9s” and “10s”,’ says Lauren Frazer-Hutton, 29, a model and former Made in Chelseareality TV star who was happy to talk about her Raya membership. ‘It’s a population of good-looking people.”
It was a Raya investor who first introduced Lauren to the app when she was living in Los Angeles last year, and she downloaded it almost straight away. But it wasn’t until December that she actually signed up. Getting vetted took a day - the most famous applicants are OK’d within an hour, while other people say they’ve had to wait as long as three weeks. Part of joining is a $10-monthly subscription fee (although the most famous members are exempt). This was ostensibly introduced as a means of checking that people are who they say they are. ‘It’s to avoid catfishing [creating false profiles],’ explains 22-year-old member Jade*, ‘which is actually great, because it means they weed out the scary weirdos you can get on Tinder.’
Georgie*, a 25-year-old Australian living in New York, has been using Raya on and off for about a year.
“On a scale of one to Jake Gyllenhaal, everyone is hovering around a Bradley Cooper,” Georgie says. “People fall into the following categories: a really attractive person, like a model, a very rich dude, someone who is a friend of someone who works for the app, a creative with a moderate social media following, Hollywood aristocracy, miscellaneous sportsperson.”
“On a scale of one to Jake Gyllenhaal, everyone is hovering around a Bradley Cooper”
Georgie*, 25, Raya user
“It’s
Georgie joined “as a bit of a joke” after a bunch of her friends – models, creatives with big social followings – egged her on. She knew she’d make the cut because she could reference three current connections already on Raya, plus her sizable (30 odd thousand) Instagram following.
Because of her age and industry, Georgie tends to be matched with ‘hipster’ musicians and creatives in Paris, Los Angeles, London and Sydney. She’s never been on a date.
“Unlike Tinder, where you can specify your ideal radius to find people in, Raya seems to assume you lead some sort of fabulous globetrotting life, and typically discounts geography when presenting you with suitors,” Georgie explains. “You end up with a lot of matches overseas, where you might chat to someone for a bit, and agree to meet up when you’re there, or vice versa. But then you sort of forget.”
Before, Georgie admits she used to “collect the good looking matches like baseball cards”, but now your profile refreshes every seven days and all your matches expire after a week. The pressure is high to move off the platform and into the real world.
Raya is not the only exclusive dating site. There’s Sparkology and the League – the latter catering to academically snobby graduates of Ivy League universities – as well as Luxy (self-described as ‘Tinder minus the poor people’), which verifies users’ wealth by their tax returns, and an invitation-only London-based app called the Inner Circle, which is primarily for Euros.
Generally, according to Jade, ‘Raya people are classier, friendlier and nicer than people on other apps. And because you can only look at 25 profiles at a time, people aren’t ruthlessly swiping like they do on Tinder, where people are just looking for nasty hook-ups.’
You can also avoid the Tinder-specific problem of men sending photographs of their penises. But, Lauren argues, Raya has its own version of the dick pic: ‘The guy photographed in front of a G6,’ she says. ‘And there are plenty of them. It’s either a jet or a sports car – probably not even theirs. For me, they are always a no.’ (One guy invited her to ‘come to the Hamptons on my jet’. Being English, she told him to ‘stick it up his gold-plated arse’.)
Georgie adds: “There are unprecedented levels of narcissism on Raya because of the whole way you present yourself on the app.” Each member compiles a slideshow of profile pictures and sets the whole thing to music. “One artist has his own song as his profile song,” Georgie deadpans.
But is Raya about to change? Jade, Georgie and Lauren all say that when they joined, late last year, the community was ‘small and cosy’ – Lauren estimates around 2,000 people – ‘maybe more, but not many more.’
By the end of January 2016, according to one analytics site, Raya was getting around 880 visits per day. “The pool feels somewhat more diluted than when I joined,” Georgie says.
‘It’s so much bigger now,’ adds Lauren. “And they are opening their doors to anyone – sorry to sound like a snob, but those attractive girls who aren’t really known, just Insta-famous girls. Fashiony ones.’ Others complain that Raya’s promise to introduce them to like-minded people in the creative industries has not been kept. ‘It’s been diluted by business people. It’s full of brand owners. And athletes,’ says 32-year-old Camilla (also not her real name), a photographer.
‘You can almost see it spreading from city to city. First LA, then New York, London, Sydney and Paris, and now it’s going all over Europe,’ says Lauren.
Will Raya be a victim of its own success? Will popularity destroy exclusivity? Camilla thinks not – as long as the vetting process is adhered to. ‘A lot of people use it for work as much as for dating. It’s a social platform. There are agents on Raya looking for models, models looking for photographers. You can also heart girls, even if you are not into them romantically. It’s as much for making friends as anything else. It’s still very exclusive, but you can use it as a tool for work, as well as scroll through it in the back of an Uber and have a gawp.
Like a cross between a trendy, snobby club and LinkedIn? ‘Yes. Basically.’
* All names have been changed to protect the innocent
A version of this story originally appeared in Tatler.
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