Courtesy: Chelsea Ritschel | News Source: independent.co.uk

You can’t believe everything you see on Instagram - a point one blogger proved when she faked an entire birthday trip to Disneyland.

In an effort to show just how filtered, photoshopped, and Facetuned the social media platform can be, blogger Carolyn Stritch decided to experiment.

Pretending it was her 22nd birthday and she was celebrating with a trip to California, the blogger proved just how easy it is to portray a life vastly different than reality to her 189,000 followers.

Stritch, who posts under @theslowtraveler, wrote: “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!”

Alongside the caption, Stritch uploaded a flawless photo of herself sitting in bed.

The following day, Stritch uploaded a photo in which she appears to be standing in front of Sleeping Beauty’s Castle, which happens to be empty except for her - and received over 18,000 likes. 

She wrote: “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!”

However, Stritch never actually went to Disneyland, nor was she celebrating her 22nd birthday - as she is actually 32.

Instead, she was actually relying solely on photography and some pretty impressive editing skills to trick her followers.

On her blog, the blogger came clean about “hacking” her own Instagram - admitting that she “came up with a story: my FaceApped perfect self, who’s ten years younger than I am, flies off to Disneyland for the day, and somehow manages to photograph herself all alone in front of Sleeping Beauty’s Castle.”  

According to Stritch, the idea for the experiment came to her after she downloaded FaceApp and uploaded a heavily-edited photo to Facebook - and nobody questioned it, including her own mum.

But the blogger realised just how unrealistic social media has become when she was able to successfully trick her thousands of followers into believing she was ten years younger and in Disneyland. 

This, Stritch acknowledges, is because Instagram is really good at “escapism, the aspirational, the inspirational."

In reality, however, Instagram rarely shows the whole picture - as there would likely be many more people posing in front of Sleeping Beauty’s Castle.