
Rebecca Pearson is a jobbing model and for the last year has been creating the ‘perfect life’ on Instagram in order to get work. Here she reveals the truth behind some of her most popular snaps.
Before this week you may have never heard of Essena O’Neill; a bikini toting, beach leaping glossy teen who, with over 800,000 followers, was bit of a star on Instagram – one of the world’s most popular social media sites. But when she switched off her account, decrying her life as a vapid popularity contest in which she no longer wished to compete, her story made headlines across the world.
By re-captioning some of her most liked posts to reveal the creative licence that went into creating the ‘perfect’ photographs of her ‘perfect’ life , the 19 year old Australian model said she wanted to expose the artificial world of social media. After spending her teen years curating her life into a polished, barely-clothed sun-kissed world her followers, she said, would finally see the truth. One photo, she explained, had had to be taken over a hundred times to get absolutely right and in another she revealed she was paid hundreds of pounds to wear a certain dress. She told how she would starve herself for days to get the perfect flat stomach, and a new caption under a smiling selfie ends with a disclaimer all in upper case: ‘There is nothing real about this’. Often, she said, she felt utterly alone. While some users applauded her honesty, days later other commentators were calling the whole thing a hoax, a clever marketing ploy whereby Essena was simply making herself (and a her new website) even more famous.
It’s a sorry tale for a platform that started out as simply a means to share and discover experiences through photographs; where users can ‘like’ another person’s picture to show their appreciation for a beautiful photograph before scrolling onto the next shot. Today, Instagram has 400 million+ users which is probably why after it was launched five years ago, it has mutated into a behemoth of self-promotion where the more likes a person has, the more prestige and earning-power they can command.