CuriositiesSEP 2, 2022

The “Instagram Reality” Community Is Dedicated To Exposing The Fakest Photos Online, Here Are 40 Of Their Best Posts (New Pics)

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I’m just going to smooth out this ooooone pimple. It’ll be gone in a few days anyway, so it will be a more accurate representation of what I look like! Okay, maybe a little saturation here and there, and it wouldn’t hurt to make myself look a tiny bit taller. I do look like that from some angles! While I’m at it, I might as well adjust my arms a tiny bit and smooth out the rest of my skin. Okay, done! Posting it now. Wait, I forgot to contour my nose!

Editing photos can be a dangerous game. One moment you think you’re just going to enhance the colors in the picture, and before you know it, the subject featured is unrecognizable to you. But you’ll post the pic on social media claiming it’s a selfie anyway… As editing apps and websites have become more advanced over the years and the pressure to be perfect online seems to be mounting, Instagram has become saturated with photos that are extremely fake.

So to call out the people who aim to pass off cartoon versions of themselves online, the Instagram Reality subreddit was born. We’ve compiled some of the best posts from the community down below to serve as a reminder that you can’t trust everything you see on the internet. Below, you'll also find an interview with award-winning professor of psychology and author of the book Beauty Sick, Dr. Renee Engeln, to hear her take on the obsession with editing online.

Be sure to upvote the pics you find most hilarious or cringe-worthy, and then let us know in the comments how you feel about the incessant photo editing on social media. And if you’re interested in viewing even more of these photos that aren’t fooling anyone, you can find Bored Panda’s last article on the same topic right here.

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#21 I Expected The Facetune But Not The Armpittune

alekstoro

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231points

Another unsettling impact of these overly edited photos is that many of the women posting them end up looking eerily similar. They distort their faces to look like the ‘beautiful’ influencers they follow, and over time, they all start looking the same. Then these women, and many others, bring these photos into plastic surgeons’ offices, and they permanently transform into this “Instagram face” that was never even real to begin with. And as Dr. Renee Engeln told The Huffington Post, “We don’t all look young and we don’t all have full lips and smooth skin, and when you see this kind of uniformity, it’s a real denial of human physical features. I think that’s ugly no matter what. That kind of denial hurts people. It makes them feel erased, and for women in particular, it makes them spend God knows how much time trying and trying to reach that look that they may be genetically unable to reach.”

#22

The “Instagram Reality” Community Is Dedicated To Exposing The Fakest Photos Online, Here Are 40 Of Their Best Posts (New Pics)

annelongwood

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228points

#23 Found This On Pinterest For “Long Hair” Made Me Laugh

Harlequin-mermaid

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224points

#24 She's From Finland And Gets Upset When People Claim That She Edits Her Pics

gunsunflower

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216points

But social media does not have to be all bad, Dr. Engeln says. “One of the good things social media does is allow people to seek out feeds that do represent more diversity. So you don’t have to have a feed where everyone’s face looks the same. You can opt out of that. I think that’s the promise. Social media is democratizing in some ways. You’re not just letting fashion magazines dictate what faces we see. I think that’s really great.” So as hard as it may be to post an unedited photo or remind yourself that we really don’t know what most influencers look like in person, remember that the internet is not reality. No matter how hard people may try to convince you, and themselves, that it is.

#25 Thanks For Asking, We Are A Naturally Poreless Couple

oaoao

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214points

#26 For The Love Of God Please Let This Be A Joke

atomicalexx

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211points

#27 Red Carpet vs. Instagram

dabombdotmom

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204points

We hope you're getting a kick out of these ridiculously edited photos. I'm sure none of you pandas out there would ever post a photo that deserves a spot on this list, but I'd still like to remind you that less is more when it comes to editing. Be sure to keep upvoting the photos that you want to call the Instagram vs. Reality police on, and let us know in the comments how you feel about apps like Facetune. Then if you'd like to see even more of these hilarious photo editing fails, you can find our last article on the Instagram Reality subreddit right here.