The new online honesty

Imagine if we decided to be less perfect on Instagram. What if we only posted photos of our only-okay days? What if we posted with more honesty? Journalist Renate van der Zee is all for it.

Bente van de Wouw is a Dutch blogger, columnist, and an online editor at Flow. She is promoting ‘the new honesty’ on her Instagram @tobehonestnl. “I want to shatter this idea of the perfect picture,” she says. “I noticed that we are often dishonest online and that this can make people really insecure. We start to wonder why our lives aren’t so perfect, what are we doing wrong? It really is okay to show people the reality.”

The fact that so many people can relate to this is evident from the many responses Van de Wouw received to an article she wrote about an app that can edit your selfie to make you look perfect. She published two photos with the article, one showing what she really looks like and one that has been edited by the app. Suddenly, she had fantastic, unblemished skin and perfect eyebrows.