CHARLOTTE, N.C. - Oh, the horror!  The good people at www.BeautifulPeople.com, a dating website where you have to be pretty to join, thought something was up when their membership database swelled by 35,000 members last month.  They figured surely not all 35,000 of them could be beautiful.  And they were right.

An ever so aptly-named "Shrek" virus infected the site and allowed all the uglies to "invade" the database.  The team at BeautifulPeople.com quickly put all of the 35,000 members in question back into the "rating process."

That's how you legitimately get into the site. The current beautiful people vote on whether you're attractive enough to make the cut.  Only 5,000 were deemed truly beautiful enough.

Greg Hodge, the managing editor of BeautifulPeople.com says, "It's obviously a bitter pill to swallow, to mistakenly being led to believe you're beautiful, being accepted into the community only to realize there was an error."

BeautifulPeople.com was kind enough to set up a "support line" for the rejects to vent.  One woman tells us, "If you need it to talk to somebody, that's great, but if you're letting somebody judge you based on a website, don't take it to heart."

South End Charlotte resident Devin Popenfuss doesn't even like beautiful people!  He says, "'Cause usually pretty people are the kind of flighty ones."

And Stephen Wilfong, now a Myers Park resident, trailblazed the way for fellow uglies when he lived in New York.  He says, "I used to model up there and I was considered the ugly guy on the photo shoots. And I had 2 or 3 photographers say 'get the ugly guy in the shot' and they'd always put a mask on me or like a bulls head on me.  I didn't care, I got paid, I got a pay check just like the pretty guys so I didn't really care!"

Hodge says "uglies" like Stephen are living in denial and that exclusivity and rejection are part of life.  Sadly, thanks to the Shrek virus, the largest number of ugly rejects came from the USA and the fewest from Denmark.

Hodges says, "If Mensa's database swelled with 30,000 dummies, they're not going to lower their IQ scores, they're going to have to act."  

Charlotte once had "The Beautiful Club," an actual social club, not a website.  It closed because the parties got too expensive to host.  The founder is looking to relocate the club to a bigger city.