Blogger fakes entire holiday to show the warped side of social media

We’re always told to remember that everything on Instagram isn’t as shiny as it looks but when it looks that shiny it's hard not to believe.

When faced with a never-ending feed of pristine people laughing and lolling around in some exotic, impossible-to-afford location, you don’t exactly assume their life isn’t perfect, do you?

One blogger, Caroline Stritch, who has 194,000 followers, decided to take the all-is-not-what-it-seems theory and prove it once and for all.

Earlier this month, she uploaded a photo of herself looking blogger-perfect ie: muted-tone bedroom, glossy bob, no-makeup-makeup, large cup of freshly brewed coffee, along with the caption: “Tomorrow, I'm going to be 22! I'm treating myself with a trip to Californ-I-ay: I'm off to Disneyland to Instagram the hell out of Sleeping Beauty's Castle. I'll be putting myself to bed nice and early tonight: I'm flying tomorrow and coming home Monday (need a magic carpet, not an aeroplane). I'll be by myself, but so what? It'll be my very own fairytale. Human possibilities vastly exceed our imagination!”

The next day she uploaded a photo of herself looking polished and carefree in front of the Disneyland castle and captioned the shot: “I've taken myself off to California. There I am in front of Sleeping Beauty's Castle – my crazy, self-indulgent 22nd birthday present to myself. Tomorrow I'll be back home and it'll be like it never even happened! I keep saying to myself: it's kind of fun to do the impossible. Life is what you make it!”

The thing is though, she hadn’t taken herself off to California and she wasn’t turning 22. She was turning 32 and had stayed at home that weekend.

Stritch revealed her reasons for hacking her own Instagram on her blog, stating that she was influenced by Will Storr’s book, Selfie: How We Became So Self-Obsessed and What It’s Doing To Us, which reveals the danger associated with perfection in the digital age. She wanted to create a project that would fully illustrate to people how far you can go to manipulate reality.

She wrote: “I wanted my fictional narrative to challenge the way I portray myself online and the effects of this portrayal.

“I don’t usually FaceApp my face or pretend I’ve been places I haven’t. But I never read by the window – those windows, beautiful as they are, make my flat freezing cold. Sometimes that coffee cup I’m holding is empty. I suck in my stomach. I rearrange the furniture. I photoshop out dirty marks made by bashing furniture off the walls.

“Is it bad to do those things? I don’t know.

“What I do know is this: I take those pictures because they’re the kind of pictures I like to look at.

“Instagram is really good at escapism, the aspirational, the inspirational. So I try to get those things into pictures I post.

“Nobody wants to see me in my pyjamas, with my explosive morning hair, hunched over my laptop on the sofa. That’s how I spend most of my days. You want to see my books, my windows, my travel photography, same as I want to see the best bits of your daily lives.

“But there’s a line.

“In this project, I crossed that line, went way, way over it so I could work backwards and figure out how far I can reasonably go and still make work that’s both responsible and good.”

This is actually not the first time someone has used a media platform to blur the lines between reality.

In 2014, Dutch graphic designer, Zilla van den Born, took a five month faux-cation by photoshopping herself around the world enjoying a "gap year" and fooled everyone.

Predictably, reactions are always mixed to these kinds of projects but they do raise an important point, don't they?

Don't believe everything you scroll.