Earlier this week, Instagram celebrity Essena O’Neill publicly declared her disappointment with being a social media star. Launching a personal campaign to highlight how her virtual life has been very much curated, O’Neill renamed her Instagram account – which had half a million followers – to “Social Media Is Not Real Life,” deleting her Tumblr, YouTube and Snapchat accounts, and over 2,000 Instagram photos, while re-captioning some to explain the truth behind each picture.
O’Neill has quickly become a beacon for speaking out against the repurcussions of being addicted to social media fame and how unfulfilling it can become in real life. But long before the Australian teen released her tearful video (which has ironically garnered her an additional 300,000 followers as she has launched a website called “Let’s Be Game Changers”), many have already attempted to illustrate her point way before her intervention. One such crusader was the charming Socality Barbie, a parody Instagram account with 1.3 million followers that documented the picture-perfect life of what many have dubbed the Hipster Barbie.
Today, Socality Barbie creator Darby Cisneros has announced that the nature-loving Barbie will also be retiring from Instagram. And quite frankly, we’re going to miss her. Socality Barbie first emerged as an overnight sensation, mocking the faux lives of social media users who create an ideal life on these platforms, mostly in the name of getting likes and follows. But Socality Barbie wasn’t just a hilarious, light-hearted, plastic example of how people have become so consumed with projecting a perfect life online; the Instagram account was an enviably gorgeous one with beautifully framed photos that rivalled that of the most popular Instagram celebrities, complete with many, many hashtags.
In her final post, Cisneros writes, “I started SB as a way to poke fun at all the Instagram trends that I thought were ridiculous. Never in 1 million years did I think it would receive the amount of attention that it did but because of that it has opened the door to a lot of great questions like: how we choose to present ourselves online, the insane lengths many of us go to create the perfect Instagram life, and calling into question our authenticity and motives. It’s been a blast running this account but I believe SB’s work here is done.”
Socality Barbie’s legacy remains accessible to the public on Instagram.
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