Aubrey O’Day’s Instagram grid—of hyper-stylized glamor shots, set in far-flung locales—resembles those of the countless lifestyle influencers and Daily Mail celebrities who litter our Explore pages. These visual travelogs are a calculated display of algorithmic knowledge, of the poses, angles, and landscapes proven to garner engagement. But whether O’Day is splayed on a tree branch hovering above the South Pacific in Bora Bora, or surveying the cliffs of the Balinese island of Nusa Penida, the former Danity Kane singer’s photos tend to have a strange surreality to them—like a Cindy Sherman portrait. Some appear static, without dimension; others are compositionally awkward. Eagle-eyed viewers have clocked the visual peculiarities: “So pretty it almost looks like you were painted into the scenery,” reads one comment under a photo of O’Day, posing in front of the Acropolis in Athens, dressed in a gleaming Grecian gown. “ITS JUST THE CAMERA FOCUS SMH she might change the filter & it look kinda weird but it’s the camera,” reads another, under the same photo.

But geotags deceive. In August of 2022, after months of posting carousels across uncanny paradises, O’Day copped to Photoshopping herself into the images—some of which, allegedly taken by other influencers. She claims to be a creative director, who does “everything from [her] hair, glam, nails, styling, backdrops, editing, [and] shooting,” and demands that her followers “respect her aesthetic.” “If I want my Instagram to be curated like a museum of ART, then that’s what the fuck is going to happen,” she wrote, reiterating her role as a content creator.

We can accept a wholly mediated image from a figure like Beyoncé, because she’s a monolithic icon who communicates solely through her art. Her social media is purely a moodboard—a collection of self-produced editorial images. Perhaps the difference lies in status: Beyoncé is one of the most famous artists in the world, and doesn’t (need to) rely on social media in the same way that O’Day does. But for public figures who use social media as an influencer platform, a doctored photo reveals a desire for higher status that they haven’t yet achieved.

“If stars are just like us, what is the point of stars?”

By now, “celebrity Photoshop fails” aren’t just regular social media and tabloid fodder; they incite severe mockery—and even outrage. In 2017, Bow Wow was endlessly ridiculed for tweeting a photo of himself boarding a private jet, after a civilian revealed that the rapper was seated beside them in economy. This past Christmas, Paula Abdul, now 60, posted a photo on Instagram, apparently editing her face down to resemble a girl at her Bat Mitzvah. There are self-organizing task forces determined to identify Kardashians’ Photoshop fuck-ups. Celebrity responses range from silence (Abdul) to denial (Khloé Kardashian)—dominated by an insistence that their personas are authentic. O’Day, however, makes no such plea. Again, she’s creating content. These are images, not a photo diary documenting her “real” life. “I work hard to give y’all beautiful content that feels the way the places I travel vibrate,” she wrote last August, inviting her audience to suspend their disbelief and collude with her.

Theoretically, social media equipped the masses with the digital tools to appear wealthier or more beautiful—to align our digital images with the prevailing beauty or aesthetic standard. But when the actually rich and famous—the people we’ve anointed as aspirational, and therefore worthy of our attention and money—use those same tools, it suggests that they harbor our same desires. If stars are just like us, what is the point of stars?

The creator economy and influencer culture seemingly hinge on the authenticity industrial complex. But ultimately, there are limits to how bona fide we want celebrities to be. Social media is closer to The Hills than The Real World: manufactured genuinity for maximum entertainment value. In a piece for i-D, writer Rayne Fisher-Quann notes how the creator economy ushered in a new mode of viewership, where audiences prefer the veneer of authenticity over real performance. “Because perfection (whether physical, moral, or otherwise) is essentially defined by its inaccessibility, authenticity doesn’t actually require any less construction than the modes of entertainment that came before it,” she writes.

“On their face, Photoshop fails feel deceptive. But they actually reveal a genuine, primal, universal desire: to be perceived as the best (looking) version of yourself.”

A few months ago, British influencer Lydia Millen endured swift and ruthless backlash after she posted a TikTok of herself getting ready to stay at The Savoy Hotel; she couldn’t heat her mansion in the midst of England’s energy crisis. When Kim Kardashian lamented the work ethic of today’s generation, all hell broke loose. In an interview with Elle UK, Gwyneth Paltrow gifted a now-infamous quote, about how she “can’t pretend to be somebody who makes $25,000 a year.” On one hand, people don’t want to hear the rich complain. But these examples further expose the gap between authenticity and relatability; these may well be genuine expressions of celebrities’ lifestyles (Millen and Paltrow) or work mentality (Kardashian), but they’re not by any means relatable. When celebrities stray so far out of touch, it feels like a betrayal—even though their lavish lifestyle is the reason we follow them in the first place. Photoshopped images are one such breach in the aspirational persona.

As viewers, we’re not primed to search for cracks in the facade. “Our brains are just not wired to perpetually doubt,” says Andrea McDonnell, an associate professor of political science at Providence College and media scholar who specializes in the history of celebrity in the United States. We function from a starting point of believability, where most of us see most images and interpret it as the thing itself—even though we know rationally that like, her skin is retouched, her waist is exact photoshopped.”

On their face, Photoshop fails feel deceptive. But they actually reveal a genuine, primal, universal desire: to be perceived as the best (looking) version of yourself. O’Day owns the artifice of celebrity more than most, and recognizes that audiences may disregard a video of her just going about her day. “A pic of me drenched with pit stains after hiked for 2 hours to a location just doesn’t excite me visually,” O’Day wrote in an Instagram DM that she posted after the scandal. “I feel sad that so many people need that in order to feel like my travels were real or that my experience in everyplace i went to and shared with vou wasn’t authentic.” Perhaps the idea of stars being just like us forces us to contend with why we want to emulate them. Keeping that distance maintains their function as idols to worship—a model for living and being. Or at least a distraction.

“Economic capital—money—feels increasingly impossible to accrue. But social, cultural, and aesthetic capital—who we know, what we buy, and how we look—are easier, and social media has strengthened their currency.”

In his book Status and Culture, cultural historian W. David Marx says that our desire for status is essential and universal—that our existential need to jump the social ladder shapes popular taste. And naturally, where celebrities lead, we follow. “There is a difference between a photograph that’s been developed in a dark room and an image—a digital image—that can go through multiple layers of production before we ever see it,” says McDonnell. “We are all not only consuming that, but we’re also producing it.” The standards for acceptable social media images now mostly include some kind of editing. “No one’s telling you to [edit], but there’s this built-in push; there are factors that encourage us to do that.”

This feels especially deceptive in a cultural moment where we can’t discern fact from fiction. “It’s this effort to maintain an illusion of perfection, then denying that we needed to create the illusion,” says McDonnell. “We’re in this moment where image sometimes seems to matter more than reality. And that can be fun, but I do think that there’s a certain point where it becomes problematic—and even dangerous where we’re talking about points of fact, and we can’t even agree on them anymore.” The Instagram account @problematicfame, which posts before-and-after pics of celebrities (of all genders) suspected of undergoing cosmetic procedures, is not meant to shame or expose, but to “[spread] awareness on how instagram can impact beauty standards.” Under a recent video acknowledging Kylie Jenner’s Photoshop acumen, one user commented, “The amount of time I’d spend in front of the mirror wondering WHY God did not make me as beautiful as all those influencers… just to realize I’ve been idolizing something fake. I need to stop doing that for real lol.”

In digital life, status markers are easy to flaunt and fake. Economic capital—money—feels increasingly impossible to accrue. But social, cultural, and aesthetic capital—who we know, what we buy, and how we look—are easier, and social media has strengthened their currency. (Perhaps that’s why shopping the SSENSE sale, thrifting, and vintage furniture collecting have become the primary pastimes of the very-online.) We know that social media and image editing tools help to create global beauty standards. Faking those things online means faking your status—exposing just how embarrassing and shameful, yet foundational the brazen pursuit of it is.