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Compared with the common population, a greater proportion of the women and older adult males who advertise themselves on  dating sites  smoke, according to some light hearted studies published in the March edition of the Medical Journal.

The study comes from Simon Hillman, Professor of Public Wellness at the University of Sydney, and doctors Melanie Hatfield and Sarah Meers from the Cancer Council.

The report looked at 102,191 advertisements on Hookmeup’, an Australian web-based online dating site, in April this year, and registered smoking status of people advertising on the web site, including the ‘Top 100′ males and females advertisers, based on the amount of times each advertisements were looked at.

“In each age group for adult females, there were higher balances of smokers among the advertisers than in the common population,” Professor Hillman said.

“This represented  the case for males aged 50 years and beyond.

“By comparison, there was a higher balance of non-smokers in the ‘Top 100′ males or females advertisers age 20-29 years (85 %) compared with total Hookmeup advertisers in this age grouping (69 %).

“Eighty five percentage of men and 78 percentage of women in the two ‘Top 100′ groupings were non-smokers, with only 2 % of both sexes laying claim to be regular smokers.

“Singles ‘clicking on’ the photos of advertisers do not recognise the person’s smoking position before they view the data supplied.

“Hence, the ‘Top 100′ men and women are picked out for their looks. That just 2 per cent of these 200 people were daily smokers hints that smoking may be linked with less appealing looks.

“Such data could allow a lot of smokers extra motivation to give up,” Professor Hillman said.

With all the internet online dating niche sites on the market, perhaps there could be a singles site set up that just caters for non-smokers. The internet  dating industry has seen many unusual niche sites emerge such as owner/pet dating sites, dating sites catering only for black people, specific religion groups, just to name a few.