How to praise a pretty girl

When a woman posts a photo, she is usually showing you a moment or a mood, not asking to be rated. The caption, the setting, what she's holding, and what she's doing in the frame tell you more about what she wants to be noticed for than the photo itself. A story about a trip, a dog, a plate of food, or a finished project is a signal that the thing in the picture is what she's proud of. Pointing at that thing says you looked at her life, not just her angle.

If the post is a straight selfie with no caption, you have less to work with. In that case the honest move is usually to comment on the energy of the photo, the colour, or something small like a detail in the background. Hitting on her looks directly with nothing else on the table tends to get a polite nothing back, because she has no way to respond without it feeling like she's accepting a rating.

There are a few kinds of praise that do different jobs. One points at a choice she made, like the jacket, the colour she picked, or the way she styled something, and invites her to say where it came from. One points at a feeling the photo gives off, like it looks like a good night, and invites her to tell you about the night. A third is a light tease about something she's clearly joking about, which only works if the tone already has some back and forth in it.

You can tell a draft is the right kind when it has a noun or a specific thing in it that she could answer about. It should leave out the words gorgeous, stunning, and any sentence that is only about her face. It also shouldn't end on a demand. A compliment with a question attached is fine, but the question should be easy to answer in one line.

Send the compliment at a time when she's likely to be on her phone and not in the middle of something, which usually means evening or during a commute, not at two in the morning and not at a time you'd only send if you were drinking. If she reacts to the story or responds with a short line, that's your opening, and you can keep it going with one follow-up question about what she said.

If she doesn't reply, leave it alone for at least a day or two before doing anything else. A second message in the same day reads as needing a response. If another day or two passes with nothing, one light message that references something else she posted is fine. If that also gets nothing, stop. Silence after two tries is an answer, and continuing to send things is the fastest way to end up as the guy she mutes.