Okay, real talk for a minute here folks. Chucking a cheeky selfie up on Instagram or Facebook is no longer a thing that one does on a whim. A single selfie has to leap through hoops – makeup application, editing process, best friend approval, caption creation.
Your crafted selfie goes through more scrutiny than your damn email password (because TBH the set-up reminder for two-step authentication is a yawn). And then after you go through all that hassle to pop up a simple image of your blessed face, the response comes.
Last year alone, over 115 million selfies on Instagram were posted and then deleted coz they copped an unimaginable amount of something called beauty cyber bullying – getting hate based purely on what you look like online.
It’s seriously messed up, and Australia is one of the world leaders in beauty cyber bullying (behind America and Argentina).
According to a global study conducted by Rimmel in 2017, cyber beauty bullying affects one in four women globally, with 39% of those bullied no longer willing to post selfies or photos of themselves and 40% straight up deleting their accounts.
It’s rubbish – if you’re feelin’ yourself and you want to post a 10/10 selfie then you should absolutely post the 10/10 selfie. It’s not a question of looking perfect – folks gotta express themselves! It’s something Rimmel really cares about.
Their campaign, called#IWillNotBeDeleted and aimed at fighting the surge of beauty bullying (in partnership with the Cybersmile Foundation), has attracted the attention of Rimmel ambassadors Rita Ora and Cara Delevingne, both of whom have been victims of bullying in the past and now face intense scrutiny over their appearance every day as part of the music and film industry.
Delevingne said herself that, “The idea that some people make decisions in anticipation or fear of potential bullying is heartbreaking”. And she’s not wrong.
Both she and Ora feel so strongly about it that they took part in an intense vid for the campaign below.
Honestly though, you should absolutely take and post as many selfies as you want. Nobody’s dodgy attitude and mean streak should prevent you from feeling confident in yourself, so the perpetrators should quite simply zip their lips coz attacking people on their appearances is beyond messed up.
If you know anyone that might need to hear those words, be sure to let them know that they’re not the only ones. There’s a big ol’ community rallying against the bullying and this vid is just the beginning.
And TBH we need to get ourselves sorted because this is definitely one statistic where we don’t want to be in the top three globally.
