It’s 2019 and the web is crammed with Kardashian simulacra with bodies like an hourglass and faces beat for the gods. We’re all acquainted with it – that look, with the Kylie Jenner pout, the contoured nose and fluttery eyes like a Bratz Doll; the oh-so-proportioned figure with the slim waist and the peachy butt that seems to exist almost exclusively online and on red carpets. We realize it’s unrealistic yet a few of us still strive to attain it, whether it’s through face filters that coat your face in a digital vaseline, photo editing apps like FaceTune or cosmetic procedures that plump you up and slim down your facial expression. Whichever route you go down, it’s a glance that takes plenty of work to attain. Work that’s being quickly unpicked by a latest wave of eagle-eyed Instagram accounts.

By now, you’ll know the infamous Celeb Face. Dubbed the Food regimen Prada of celebrity airbrushing, the private (and anonymous) account – which has over 1 million followers – is notorious for its scathing posts, unmasking the cosmetic and photoshopped secrets of the wealthy and famous. With a gap bio that reads “WELCOME TO REALITY” in all-caps, the account is a wormhole of GIFs and pictures, hellbent on exposing the reality beneath the celebrity aesthetic: faces magnified to disclose skin caked in foundation, before-and-afters of influencers IRL and post-FaceTune, and pictures of celebrities pre and post non-invasive treatment and cosmetic surgery. Admittedly, it’s fascinating to see the money and time people spend to attain this level of beauty revealed (one comment on a post of model Eiza Gonzalez reads, “you’re not ugly, you’re just broke”, and looking out at it gives you an identical type of macabre delight that you simply might get reading a tabloid.

But Celeb Face is just the tip of the iceberg. Instagram is filled with dozens of accounts unveiling the inner-workings of celebrity beauty, from accounts like @celebbeforeafter and @igfamousbodies (each sitting at around 50k followers) that show before-and-after transformations of famous people to @celebritydentistry (44.5k followers), which sees images of wonky pre-celebrity teeth juxtaposed with their latest and improved Hollywood smiles. Clearly, these accounts are popular; but just who’re the anonymous vigilantes behind them? What really motivates them? And more importantly, what are the implications?

“The web has so many lies. Some people tell me on the every day that my account boosts their self-esteem because now they know that influencers are usually not perfect and that they’ve flaws or insecurities,” says the anonymous user behind Exposingallcelebs, an Instagram that chronicles the visual transformations of celebrities. It’s a sentiment that’s echoed by Celebface who told The Daily Mail last yr: “This shouldn’t be a page for hate. That is the page for individuals who use Instagram on daily basis and think celebrities are perfect. But no one is ideal. Celebrities are extraordinary people.”

In an excellent world, no-one should should disclose details about themselves that they don’t need to disclose, but it surely’s comprehensible that individuals are keen to bust the lid on a beauty industry that profits from our insecurities. The problem boils right down to this: When role models attempt to pass off their enhanced looks as au naturel, it has serious implications for the hundreds of followers who consider that they were born like this. So long as there are people whose edited looks secure million-dollar sponsorship deals, these pages and the interest surrounding them is inevitable.

However it’s not all about myth busting for the sake of our self-esteem. IG Famous Bodies merely desires to normalise the concept of cosmetic surgery by showing just what number of celebrities have had something done, and in turn educate users on what options are on the market should they need to try something out. With a gap bio that reads, “Celeb transformations. Study procedures”, and story highlights divided into handy sections similar to cheek fillers, age reversal and botox, IG Famous Bodies tries to search out a balance between the usual celebrity transformation pics and info. One story highlight is even dedicated to the founder’s own cosmetic before-and-afters.

“The stigma surrounding cosmetic procedures implies that no-one really talks about it and celebrities deny it, or worse, attribute the outcomes to something like exercise or eating clean,” Famous Bodies explains. “If someone is adamant they’re natural when it’s very obvious they’ve had work done or photoshopped the image, it’s deception.This leads to plenty of misinformation and ignorance, which is something I need to assist resolve, so I’ll call them out for it. I need people to learn what procedures are on the market, what the expected results are, the downtime, pain and price. I believe reducing ignorance about cosmetic procedures makes it more likely for everybody to have a healthy concept of what they’re, what they’ll achieve, and learn how to have a secure and legal procedure.”

But irrespective of the rationale, whether you’re reporting on celebrity surgery as a way of reassuring the general public that as a general rule most individuals don’t just #wakeuplikethis, or merely attempting to normalise cosmetic surgery, it’s still an incredibly mean – and potentially emotionally harmful – technique to out someone’s insecurities, especially on a pubic platform like Instagram. Khloe Kardashian famously blocked Celeb Face for posting about her, while Dubai sisters and make-up artists Sonia and Fyza Ali even threatened the account with lawsuits. “Yes, it hurts some Instagram models’ feelings,” admits IG Famous Bodies. “I’ve had requests and even been threatened by some to remove their pictures. I get plenty of hate mail after I post someone really loved like Taylor Swift or Bella Hadid. I attempt to tell them it’s nothing personal.”

Exposingallcelebs has also had its justifiable share of criticism. “Some people think I don’t have any life and that I’m a hater,” she confesses. Except for people blocking her (which is outwardly commonplace), it’s not rare to receive threatening DMs from influencers and fans alike, warning for posts to be taken down. Since starting this text, the account has been blocked twice and reemerged on different accounts, but this isn’t anything out of the extraordinary: in truth plenty of accounts supply backup profiles of their bios. So given the quantity of hate surrounding these profiles, and the indisputable fact that much of this content is clearly harmful or offensive, how do these users justify their accounts?

For IG Famous Bodies, the risks of denying surgery outweighs the ethics of calling someone out for deception. She mentions the instance of @Krotchy (real name Sarah McDaniel), an influencer with over a million followers, who was known for having heterochromia or mismatched irises – that’s, until Celeb Face posted a childhood photo of the model with matching brown eyes, with the words: “Expectation: A poor girl with different colored eyes” “Reality: An extraordinary liar who had eye color surgery and tells everyone about her ‘real’ heterochromia now”. The caption references a 2016 interview with the then-newly rebranded Playboy, where McDaniel recounts her struggles with the genetic condition, which incorporates getting bullied for it at college. “It’s disturbing to me that she would lie,” IG Famous Bodies tells us. “My biggest issue with it’s that now she became the face of heterochromia, similar to Winnie Harlow is the face of vitiligo.

While this shows that not all examples are as clear cut as we might need originally anticipated, it raises a vital query: was it really as much as Celeb Face (who has recently been revealed as a 24 year old girl called Anna) to choose it was in the general public’s interest that McDaniel was lying? Indeed, within the months following the incident the model reported experiencing panic attacks and depression as a direct consequence of the attacks. Like many individuals on Instagram who alter their looks via surgery, make-up contouring, Photoshop or otherwise, the model had no obligation to disclose the key behind her eyes, just as you don’t should disclose airbrushing a spot from your individual Insta profile. It’s simply no-one’s business but your individual – until perhaps it’s.

Famous Bodies goes on to provide one other example, influencer Demi Rose Mawby, who has a fanbase of over nine million. A recent post by the model attributes her current figure to regular exercise and clean eating, which she goes onto explain helped her overcome an eating disorder. “I even have been working with a private trainer or by myself within the gym 3-4 times per week. God bless those that have suffered with an eating disorder,” reads the post that juxtaposes two images of Mawby next to at least one one other (in a single, she is noticeably skinny with minimal curves, and in the opposite, a curvalicious hourglass shape with a tiny waist, large breasts and a peachy ass. Famous Bodies says: “Her arms are the identical size, her stomach remains to be flat, but miraculously she gained plenty of weight only in her boobs, butt and hips? Yeah, bodies don’t work like that.”

The issue with this, Famous Bodies goes onto explain, is the comments on Mawby’s posts, normally by young girls. Comments like, “I would like this body” and “I would like your workout routine” highlight the disturbing consequences that touched-up photographs might need on impressionable teens. Because, as Famous Bodies intimates, no workout routine will have the ability to provide these results. To suggest so sets up unrealistic expectations for young girls hoping to emulate Mawby’s figure, a lot in order that they may feel like failures after they are unable to yield these specific results. The one real technique to achieve that is via cosmetic surgery. To Famous Bodies, examples like this are a part of the rationale why a report by the American Academy of Facial Plastic and Reconstructive Surgery cites social media because the lead motivator for millennials choosing cosmetic procedures. It’s also the rationale her account exists: to combat the real-life effects of social media on an individual’s body image and mental health.

While their actions remain morally dubious, it becomes clear that from talking to the users behind these accounts, they present an excellent case for why they do what they do. Sure, they don’t really have the authority to out people’s touch-ups, and trashing people is harsh af, but their hearts appear to be in an excellent place. Admittedly, within the strategy of writing this text, I only managed to talk to a handful of accounts (many ignored my messages or refused to comment), so to say this is applicable to everyone can be a generalisation. Yet even inside this Instagram courtroom-of-sorts, IG Famous Bodies tries to maintain the tone light and complimentary. “I try my best to stick to compliments by keeping captions to easily speculating what work I believe every person has had done.” A recent post on Patrick Dempsey even celebrates his nose job.

Still, beyond actually meaning well, and debunking myths for a generation built on social media (Stars! They’re Just Like Us!) there is no shame available in getting something done, and it’s necessary – each for celebrities and their followers – to encourage one another to have interaction in an open dialogue surrounding cosmetic procedures. In any case, these accounts are symptoms of a wider problem: a systematically rigged Catch 22 model of beauty that punishes you in the event you comply, and punishes you in the event you don’t. In a recent interview with Dazed Beauty, Love Island’s Megan Barton-Hanson highlights the issue: “You’re getting bullied on the way you look. Then you definitely get all these corporations running averts saying ‘Get your latest body today’. Then whenever you do it, you’re penalised for being fake or plastic.” So so long as these discrepancies exist, the pressure to feel and look a certain way is inevitable, as is the judgy onslaught that follows, like these ruthless Instagram accounts.