YouTuber Natalia Taylor has faked an elaborate Bali holiday to her 300k Instagram followers by using snaps from a photoshoot in her local Ikea store. This is an extremely wild concept because social media is real and everything that’s posted to Instagram isn’t fabricated or curated at all, right?
“So many influencers nowadays have actually been caught in the act of pretending to be at a destination when they really weren’t, and it’s just either photoshop or it’s not even them,” she later recounted in her YouTube video documenting the experience. “The point of this video is to see if you really can fake it ’til you make it.”
So how did she fake it ’til she inevitably made it? “I got dressed in hair, make-up, wardrobe, everything and called over my trusted photographer Ally Amodeo.”
The duo popped on over to an Ikea down the road, “to see how many pictures we could take in the little furniture displays either before we got kicked or before it got a little too awkward for our own good.”
And the results were truly inspired.
“Ah yes, Indonesia, a gorgeous getaway full of tropical paradise and exotic photo opportunities, the perfect place to totally fake an influencer vacation and lie to all of my followers,” she later said.
The comment are littered with ‘OMG yes, she’s living her best life’, ‘I’m in Bali, too’ and ‘welcome to the country!’
I’m still screaming that this elaborate Bali scheme was conducted entirely inside Ikea. We stan. Also peep the Ikea tag in one of the photos…
Natalia actually left a few Easter eggs like this in her pictures to see if anyone’d pick them up, but we were all blind sheep who wanted to believe that she was living her truth in Bali.
As she reiterates to her near-2 million YouTube subscribers: “Don’t believe everything you see on the ‘gram.”
Check out the full video below. Yay, I love another reminder that everything around us is so easily faked. This hasn’t exacerbated my trust issues at all.
