I feel like I shouldn’t have to remind everyone Instagram models aren’t real– but I’m going to.

I thought we were over the phase of thinking that people in real life were supposed to look like the people we saw on Instagram. They set a new standard of beauty that people thought was achievable.

We all were wondering if people on Instagram really looked like that. If they did, why didn’t the people we saw in real life look like that? If they didn’t, they were just ugly.­

Typing the words makes me realize how ridiculous this thought process was, and it doesn’t even seem logical. Unfortunately, it not only was a real thing but still is today.­

How did we even let an app decide what the new standard of beauty was? Before that we had television and movies, but this was different.­

Of course there was a certain amount of editing done in the media to make people look better, but then there were magazines. Magazines added a whole other layer of unrealistic expectations. It was a picture that could so easily be manipulated or edited to make people look better. If you think about it, that’s basically what Instagram is now.­

But now they use apps to edit their photos to make themselves look better, and then the dangerous part: they post the picture. To the person posting the picture, this is harmless. It’s not like they are telling us we need to look like that, but our brain is telling us something else.

After day in and day out of seeing those photos, your brain starts to catalog those as “real” people and how “real” people can look.­

I constantly hear other people comparing real people to people they see on Instagram. This was a big problem at first when influencers became a thing, but now it’s gotten even worse.

When I log out of Instagram and venture out into the real world, it’s a completely different scene. People aren’t less attractive because of an app, they are real people. Sure, I love to scroll through feed and see what trends people are following– but I also live in the real world and I’d like to think everyone else is living with me.­