Insta-famous: it seems to be what every fifteen to nineteen year-old girl aspires to become, besides being young Leonardo Dicaprio’s wife or a Brandy Melville model. Becoming popular on Instagram is an art, and the artists that rise in fame are talented in the fields of selfie lighting and makeup. It’s way more relatable than Van Gogh – he’s irrelevant anyways. Did he get 100,000 likes in under an hour? Didn’t think so. These Instagram gods have a secret stash of premier editing tools that require such highly advanced skills as: sliding up the contrast, increasing exposure, and even boosting saturation. Be well assured that they also spent the ninety-nine cents on the C1-C3 filters on VSCOcam, and if their FitTea promotion was successful, they purchased the remaining twenty filters as well.

After the hours, days, weeks, and years, spent striving to achieve such a high level of social media following, one can bask in the ability to receive thousands of likes and hundreds of comments and not respond to any of them all while claiming to use social media to “interact” with their audience; because yes, they’re that cool.

I suppose posting the ideal selfie in which thousands drool, idolize and praise you for your style and beauty, unaware it took four hundred shots, three makeup retouches, four clothing changes, and five locations to get it spontaneously perfect, is enough “interaction” for a couple hours; or at least until it is time to showcase the vegan dinner you Postmated, oh I mean “prepared.” No one needs to know about the Chipotle you had afterwards.

Fortunately for the poster, the follower cannot see past the square picture that lies on the surface of their iPhone screen; they do not see the before or after, nor the ugly, sad, or embarrassing.  The follower only sees the best split second of the day, manipulated to seem even more spectacular than is really is, all to leave the follower envious of an ideal made up through hours of editing and perfecting.