What happens when an Instagram influencer stops pretending life’s perfect and shows things as they really are?
If you love it, wear it — and ignore everybody else
TWIGGY
AN OVERFLOWING recycling bin. A blurry shot of the carpet. A pair of legs on a toilet seat. A traffic jam . . . It’s fair to say that scrolling through my social media feed is pretty bleak.
There’s not a sunset or an avocado on toast in sight. This is BeReal, a new app which claims to be ‘your chance to show your friends who you really are, for once’. Every day at a different time, users are prompted to snap a photo of whatever they’re doing.
There are no filters, no hashtags, no likes. There are no retakes, no time to set up or pose. And absolutely no influencers. Instead BeReal, which is currently so popular it’s the most downloaded free app ahead of TikTok, Instagram and Facebook, is all about encouraging users to be their real selves. No wonder it calls itself the ‘antisocial media platform’.
A bonus quirk (or humiliation, depending on how you feel about unflattering photos of yourself) is that the app simultaneously takes both a shot of your current view and a surprise selfie, and you don’t get to see the selfie until after it’s been taken. My first attempt? A shot of our local playground, plus a close-up of my mug with more chins than Billy Bunter. Glamorous Instagram this most definitely is not.
The negative effects of social media have been well documented, and we all know that watching endless perfectly airbrushed posts can be damaging to our self-esteem. Facebook’s own research, leaked last year, has found that Instagram is damaging for its users,
particularly teenage girls: 32 per cent of teen girls said that when they felt bad about their bodies, Instagram made them feel worse. . So could BeReal be the solution?
As a 37-year-old mum, I have a love-hate relationship with Instagram — I find it inspiring, but it occasionally brings me down.
That said, as a travel writer, author and ‘micro-influencer’, I’ve amassed thousands of followers, and brands have paid me thousands to post sponsored content.
Posting pictures of inspirational locations (here’s me on the beach in Mauritius!) and an aspirational lifestyle (check out my new designer pram!) is part of the brand I have created for myself.
But the pressure I feel to post only the interesting things I do often means I don’t post at all (my #mumlife content mainly consists of visits to the park on repeat).
If I do take a photo, I wait until it’s a ‘good time’ to post it, so that I get more comments and likes — for example, first thing in the morning, when people are scrolling while commuting or eating breakfast.
I’m also guilty of so-called ‘Insta-Lag’ — posting photos of my
holiday even though I’m back home, to stretch out the content. And if I don’t get many likes for a picture, I feel like a failure.
All of this means that updating my social media can feel like hard work, not to mention contrived and fake.
THE truth is, there’s sometimes a significant gap between my real life and the stage-managed image I present to my followers. I’ll also look at other people’s glossy lives on Instagram and feel I’m not doing well enough — which I know deep down is ridiculous (after all, if I’m sometimes faking it then surely they are, too) — this, in turn, makes me feel annoyed at myself for being so silly.
Although we all know social media isn’t reality, when you’re stuck in a doom-scroll of filtered artifice, it can be impossible not to feel lacking.
In light of all this, I decide it has to be worth giving BeReal a go.
When I download the app, my only ‘friends’ on it are my 23-yearold cousin and the teenager down the road who babysits for my daughter. You can ‘discover’ random people’s photos, and add them as friends, but you can’t do anything at all on the app until you’ve taken a photo yourself (no lurkers allowed!) which makes BeReal even more intriguing.
When my first BeReal notification flashes up the next day to prompt me to take a picture, my initial impulse is to panic. ‘Take a photo of this?!’ I baulk, as my daughter ambles through a very ordinary patch of our local park.
I cast around wildly for something more aspirational and interesting to shoot, but the clock is ticking down from my allotted two minutes. (You can post late or retake your shot, but the app will name and shame you for it.)
So I press the button and hope for the best. I laugh out loud when I see the result, mainly at the selfie — my make-up free, sickly pale, squinting face a million miles away from anything I’d ever usually present to the world, on social media or otherwise.
Although I rarely retouch my Instagram pictures like many influencers do, I will slap on a flattering filter and crop out unsightly background objects.
I have been known to spend up to an hour getting the right shot and editing it — which is time I do resent spending, especially now that I’m a busy working mum, but I have learned to view it as a necessary part of my job.
It feels downright brave just hitting the ‘make public’ button on this snap for BeReal. I don’t need to care too much though, as all content gets wiped every day. As with Snapchat
or Instagram Stories, your pictures only last for 24 hours, so nothing can come back to haunt you unless it’s been screengrabbed.
You can write a caption, but most people don’t seem to bother.
I love how refreshing it feels, like slapping up graffiti as opposed to working away at an Old Master.
‘We’ve become so used to the glossy, polished aesthetic of social media, that simply seeing people’s Reality when she’s caught off guard real lives feels like a novelty. It’s incredibly mundane, and yet it feels fresh and fun,’ says Matt Navarra, a social media analyst.
‘The popularity of BeReal is part of a movement towards authenticity and a need for something more lo-fi from technology. An app like this is minimal effort, you can post only once a day and there are no ads, so in that way it’s comparable to the popularity of something like Wordle.’
BeReal may be mundane but it’s also surprisingly addictive. Doing something boring like cleaning the bathroom, I find myself musing how it would be perfect fodder for my BeReal feed. But, of course, I have no way of predicting when I’ll get the notification to post.
As the week goes on, I capture BeReal moments in bed, working at my laptop, on the bus, watching Anatomy Of A Scandal on Netflix and re-heating leftovers.
The selfies are mostly tired-eyed and feature some very unflattering angles and expressions.
It’s a far cry from my Instagram feed that week, where you’ll find a rooftop pool in central London, a stylish restaurant and a photo of me looking glamorous in a new maxi-dress. Comparing my two platforms, you’d think I was living a double life.
Sara McCorquodale is the founder of CORQ, an independent research agency for the influencer industry, and the author of Influence. She says apps such as BeReal work ‘fantastically well’ as a counter to the curated perfection we’re so accustomed to seeing on social media.
‘But I think people were already leaning towards more realistic, less-scripted depictions on Instagram and TikTok,’ she says.
‘We are all bored of the perfect images of the girl in a bikini standing in front of a waterfall. During the pandemic, many influencers were sharing more candid experiences — there was a period where many of them posted videos of themselves crying, for example, or sharing their unretouched, naked bodies or post-baby bodies.’
It’s interesting that Sara mentions the post-baby body shot, as the one time I have ‘got real’ on Instagram was posting a picture of myself in hospital, having just given birth — my eyes bloodshot from pushing, my face puffy from crying.
I dithered over whether to post it or not because I look so awful, but it became one of my mostliked photos. Clearly, even on the feeds of supposedly glowy influencers such as me there’s a hunger for authenticity.
Europewide, governments are trying to tackle the damaging unreality of social media apps. In Norway, it is now illegal for influencers not to disclose if their photo has been retouched.
Meanwhile, some in the industry are taking matters into their own hands. The advertising agency Ogilvy, which works with the likes of Dove and Boots, recently announced that they will no longer work with influencers who distort or retouch their bodies and faces.
Squinting, sickly pale, no make-up, it’s miles from what I’d usually post
BUT Chris Stedman, author of IRL: Finding Our Real Selves In A Digital World, says our desire to present the highlights of our lives on social media isn’t necessarily a bad thing.
‘It’s a very natural impulse to record only the best moments — think of family photo albums or home movies from childhood. But that said, it’s great that new apps are providing a space for people to be messy and let their hair down, and providing a daily reminder to do just that.’
Ironically, though, the intended spontaneity of BeReal may actually be having the opposite effect. ‘People on TikTok are talking about “getting ready” for their BeReal moment,’ says Sara. ‘That unprepared and candid nature is already being chipped away at.’
After my trial week, I manage to coax a few of my midlife friends on to BeReal, one of whom recently deleted Instagram from her phone because of how much time she was spending on it. It’s difficult to get sucked into scrolling BeReal, and given that the average person spends two hours 45 minutes a day on social media, that’s definitely appealing.
My friends’ reactions range from ‘hilarious’ to ‘baffling’. One of them is distinctly unimpressed: ‘It’s all people looking terrible and doing nothing...I don’t need an app for that.’
Which raises the other way you can ‘Be Real’ — to get off social media entirely. But where’s the fun in that?