To everyone who just unfollowed Kim K because of cellulite, this is why celebrities airbrush in the first place

Yesterday a photo of Kim Kardashian on the beach surfaced, and within hours, she’d lost 100,000 followers on Instagram.

Famously having amassed a number of her followers through the posting of similar photos, it seems peculiar this picture would have evoked such an uncharacteristically dissimilar reaction, but this one contained (I’m going to whisper so not to shock anyone) *cellulite*.

With more than 98 million followers remaining, I’d hardly characterize this a crisis situation, but it’s certainly worth noting why these accounts unfollowed her in the first place.

In a veiled attempt to make it seem as if it were about something besides their glaring inability to walk through the world with anything other than photoshop-fogged eyes, their rationalization behind the hate-unfollow was that this photo proves she might, in fact, photoshop some of the Grams on her page she claims are natural.

For a moment I’m going to pretend we don’t all face-tune ourselves to the Gods, and instead entertain the unbridled panic a reality television personality might stretch the truth in the captions of her posts averaging a million likes. This issue, like almost every other one plaguing Gen X, is rooted in our inability to sincerely accept photos of women incorporating anything we deem grotesque — in this case, real, human skin.

Surely then, what’s more repulsive is our expectation of all women to present themselves as entirely honest and un-edited, while still entirely, optically pleasing.

Be honest with yourself; you didn’t unfollow Kim because you “feel tricked by her unrealistic depictions of natural beauty”, you unfollowed Kim because she’s not naturally flawless enough for you.

@carolinephinney