r/InstagramReality is the best subreddit for all the wrong reasons

It’s not easy to look like a model in photos. There’s always something off about your face — your nose is too big, there’s blemishes on parts of your forehead you didn’t know existed. Are you frowning or do you just have a resting b***h face? That’s not a good look. Maybe you're just not a model, like the 99% of the rest of humanity.

But with the popularity of Instagram at an all time high, there’s a lot of pressure to look like the person you imagine yourself to be — or perhaps even someone you wish you looked like, but don’t.

To that end, many narcissistic, self-obsessed people have taken to modifying the pictures the way they think they should look.

Inspired by the likes of Kim Kardashian’s huge ass and James Charles' poreless skin, many denizens of Instagram simply aren’t who they appear to be, and most of them just don’t have the Photoshop and Facetune skills they need to pull off the perfect edit, resulting in curved walls and curved floors in an attempt to change the shape of their body, and skin airbrushed to the point of turning them into fricked up realdolls.

r/InstagramReality, a community on reddit, is a collection of these terrible attempts — many of which serve as examples of how not to present yourself online. Your political opinions be damned; if you don’t look entirely human, it doesn’t matter if you happen to be the nicest person in the world. You’re still going to look like a thing out of a horror movie.

I’ve been spending a lot of my time trawling the subreddit for laughs in between posting terrible memes on Twitter since discovering it this week, and some of these are truly a sight to behold. I thought I’d share a few of my finds. And yeah, some influencers aren't any good at Photoshop either.

It's not your fault if you have the facial structure of a high elf from the Elder Scrolls, but getting rid of your pores only makes you look even more like a video game character.

It's one thing to remove a couple of blemishes here and there, but if you're altering the entire structure of your face you might as well stop posting altogether.

Faces aren't the only thing people Photoshop. When you need to flex on your audience by changing your mom's Hyundai into a Lambo, you know you've got issues.

I mean, what the frick is this? Is this a human, or a doll? I've never understood why anyone would want to contort their face and body into something more akin to a piece of plastic than an actual human. Her torso is glitching, and where the hell did her left hand go?

As the caption asks, did James Charles just use a clone tool on his own pictures or what? Like we get it, you took a picture of your face at the most flattering angle you could come up with and liked the picture, but I think it'd take far less effort to just snap another photo of yourself in the new outfit than copying and pasting your exact face onto your head all over again.

Just to drive the point home about how fake James Charles is, the dude's body barely looks like himself in the finished product. You can tell he wants so bad to have killer hips, but being a man, there's just no way for that to happen. Fortunately, no man look at James Charles and thinks, "I wish I looked like that."

Yes, imagine being Nicki Minaj and having millions of followers but not bothering to put the effort into making sure the curtains aren't curved along with the Photoshopped body. That's some lazy editing and the worst part is her body doesn't even need that kind of attention.

Ever buy some clothes online that look just perfect on the model only to have them arrive and discover that they're either five sizes too small or fit over you like a fricking hefty bag. Instagram's like the human version of it with people wearing layers of catfish juice and Facetune on top of that.

Candid photos are rarely flattering, and nowhere is this more true than when you contrast them against the pictures you post to Instagram. I'll grant you that the picture on the left, while touched up, is hardly the result of Facetune magic, but the expectations it creates in those who live and breathe on social media is far from good for your mental health. You can't expect to look like a model all of the time, but being constantly bombarded by this sort of imagery can have a negative impact on the self-esteem of too-online people.

You don't always expect to be given away by a mirror, but some Instagrammers, lax in their attention to detail, are betrayed by their reflections. They're kind of like vampires except the reflection doesn't look quite as good as what they'd like people to think they look like.

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