Right now, millions of men all over the world are sweating.

They are poised over their laptops, wondering what to write to a girl whose fetching photograph they have espied on Facebook, eHarmony or, perhaps, Lifestyle Lounge.

They are wondering whether to tell her she has beautiful hair. They are twisted about whether to compliment her eyes, her cheeks or even, perish the daring, her obvious intelligence.

One false step and they will disappear into the trash.

I want to save these men from themselves and their torture. Thankfully, armed with new research from dating site Badoo.com, I bear the answer: tell her she has nice lips. Yes, lips.

Badoo's marketing director, Lloyd Price, can barely contain himself about discovering this answer. He told Reuters: "We have found the Holy Grail of flirting."

You might, given your natural skepticism and wet palms, feel suspicious. However, Badoo apparently examined 200,000 online exchanges, across 11 different countries.

The lips have it

To determine which of 12 potential opening lines was the most successful, Badoo chose two criteria: whether the line achieved so much as a reply, and whether it stimulated a longer, more vivid, conversation.

Put simply, the lips had it. Which might, for some, explain Angelina Jolie's astounding popularity.

I must, however, toss a caveat into your relief. The lips thing was only a success when all countries' results were pooled together.

Specific countries have their specific kinks. Brazilian, French, Italian, and American women are, apparently, more moved by compliments about their clothes, rather than their lips. Although one wonders whether little pictures on dating sites really give a full view of a woman's dress sense.

British women would rather you first looked down and loved their legs.

But I feel myself bound to warn anyone who might experience a sudden urge to contact Dutch or Portuguese women. For they, allegedly, responded most favorably to an opening line that waxed lyrical about their ears.

On hearing this, I realized that this research must, after all, suffer from a lack of interpretation.

These women weren't responding to opening lines about eyes, ears, nose, or throat. They weren't revealing their weakness for compliments about legs or hair, moles, or kneecaps.

It is my firm belief that these women quickly looked at the profile pictures of the senders. If they had nice eyes, legs, hair, mouth, lips, or even ears, the women responded. If they were sad-faced, bald coots with vast eyebrows, the women stayed silent.

Ours is a visual, aka superficial, world. Neither sex is deeper nor more considerate. Neither sex is more interested than the other in that sadly outdated concept known as "personality." If it doesn't come with comeliness, personality is but an empty bucket.

If you're deemed ugly, no online bon mot will do you good. You must deal with it as best you can.

I know a couple of excellent plastic surgeons, masters of the art of liposuction, Botox, nip and tuck, who are ready to help.