Cherry Blossoms (now blossoms.com) claims to be the oldest international dating agency, and that very well might be true, considering they started as a personals magazine back in 1974. They reject the term “mail order bride service”, preferring to call themselves “introduction only”. Mike Krosky, current president of the company, has several times stated that there’s not such a thing as “mail order brides”, and oposes

The result is that the Cherry Blossoms website is very much like your standard dating site, like Match.com, but with a few differences because of the target audience (i.e. people seeking an Asian romantic partner), like translation services and visa assistance.

Blossoms.com is a legitimate website; they’ve spent decades building their reputation, so they aren’t out to steal your credit card info or anything. You have to sign up with at least a free membership to be able to view profiles, which some would consider a negative. You also have to provide quite a bit of personal info when you sign up, including home address.

Membership on Cherry Blossoms

The free Cherry Blossoms membership is very limited. It allows you to create a profile, upload up to 12 pictures, view other profiles and “smile” to show interest. This is quite limited as you can’t actually communicate with anyone unless you have a paid membership. The fun of Cherry Blossoms goes away pretty fast without a paid membership.

Depending on how many months you buy at a time, your membership can cost anywhere from $10 to $25 per month, but some people in the foreign dating sphere consider this a good value considering the number of profiles and features that blossoms.com provides. Payments are through PayPal, so they’re secure.

Are the women on Cherry Blossoms real?

The site claims to have around 60,000 profiles of Asian women and around 10,000 men. The male to female ratio is about 1:4, so the prototypical member of this site (a foreign man looking for an Asian woman) has pretty good odds. Cherry Blossoms at one point had a guarantee that you would find a girl in 6 months, or they’ll give you 6 months free, but it isn’t clear if that’s still being offered. The women’s profiles on blossoms.com skews slightly older – late 20s and 30s seems to be the predominant age group.

Unlike many similar sites, Cherry Blossoms has few scammers and women who are just trying to get money out of you. They have a button on every page of their site where you can report scammers, so most profiles are serious women. But just like Match, the profiles aren’t vetted, so you have to use common sense.

Finally, according to the website ScamAdviser, the website is proven to be trustworthy. With little to no relate “scammy practices”. Unfortunately there hasn’t been reviews on the website yet. But if the wisdom of the crowd is helpful, the current Alexa Rank  of the site is around 70.000. Alexa is a ranking of how popular a website is (based on visits), any site bellow 100.000 tends to be quite popular. Therefore there are plenty of people visiting the site, and we could expect, using their services without complaints.

Summary of blossoms.com

• Safe site with long track record, based in USA
• Must pay to send messages and chat
• Decent number of member profiles
• Recently improved site functionality
• Useful features like instant message, scammer report button, translation and visa services