A dating service coming to Canada will only cater to "beautiful" people -- and we're not talking inner beauty. :)

However, that's just an excuse to post an excerpt from a wonderfully-written NYT feature about the beautiful people scene of South Beach in Miami, circa 2000.

From the May 28, 2000 NYT,  by Rick Bragg:

The soft drink sat untouched, cold, sweet and inviting. Tabitha Flores, a part-time swimsuit model, stared at the sweating can as if it were a serpent trying to lure her from the Garden of Eden.

''One hundred and twenty calories,'' Ms. Flores said, ''will kill you here.''

Ms. Flores, sitting in a consultation room in her plastic surgeon's opulent office, lives and plays here in South Beach. She feels she must be beautiful -- svelte, taut, curvaceous, tanned and expensively styled -- to belong in this community where striking beauty is commonplace.

She had asked for a diet soda, but the sugary kind was all her doctor had. ''This Pepsi,'' she said, flashing a smile of perfect, recently bleached teeth, ''could ruin my weekend.''

South Beach is utterly absorbed by beauty, peopled with fashion models and dreamers and others who just like moving about a place where bartenders pose like Grecian statues, cafe hostesses are achingly lovely, and waiters and waitresses sway blank-faced between tables as if on an invisible catwalk -- as if the ghost of Gianni Versace were looking on from a dark corner table.

The southernmost tip of the city of Miami Beach, South Beach is home to several of the country's top-tier modeling agencies. This draws beautiful people -- of all colors, straight and gay -- to this fanciful place of pastel Art Deco hotels, emerald ocean and chic, throbbing nightclubs where the unpretty, uncool and unfashionable are unwelcome.

''South Beach is Babylon,'' said Ms. Flores, who is also vice president of a marketing company. She is aware, she stressed, of the shallowness of it, of the kind of society this culture of beauty creates. But like so many other people here, she loves walking into it, competing, posing.

''There is a cultural fixation on beauty here,'' said Scott D. Schieman, assistant professor of sociology at the University of Miami. ''It's currency,'' he said, and it determines someone's worth in the eyes of the community.

''It's what rules,'' he said.

Here could be one consequence of this highly selective breeding process. From the BBC (Oct. 17, 2006):

Human species 'may split in two'

Humanity may split into an elite and an underclass, says Dr Curry Humanity may split into two sub-species in 100,000 years' time as predicted by HG Wells, an expert has said. Evolutionary theorist Oliver Curry of the London School of Economics expects a genetic upper class and a dim-witted underclass to emerge. The human race would peak in the year 3000, he said - before a decline due to dependence on technology. People would become choosier about their sexual partners, causing humanity to divide into sub-species, he added. The descendants of the genetic upper class would be tall, slim, healthy, attractive, intelligent, and creative and a far cry from the "underclass" humans who would have evolved into dim-witted, ugly, squat goblin-like creatures. ... The two subspecies would be ... ... "gracile" and "robust" humans similar to the Eloi and Morlocks foretold by HG Wells in his 1895 novel The Time Machine.