The cosmetic line DOVE made headlines when they started their campaign for Real Beauty in 2004 where “real” women where featured instead of photoshopped models.

More than ten years later Taryn Brumfitt made a documentary “Embrace” about the transformation of her body – from bodybuilder to an “everyday” physique. Her confession of how difficult it was to accept her real self, created a huge feed-back from many women struggling with the same situation. In times where we live more and more in an online world the visual aspect is of major importance. However one has to compete with fake and modified images, therefore it is a battle where an “average” person can never win. Social media has placed unreasonable expectations on our lives. There has been plenty of research into how our happiness is undermined by comparing ourselves to how we perceive others on facebook and social networking sites.

Additionally we see the big trend to fantasy heroes. A typical reaction when times are getting chaotic and insecure. People look for somebody to save them. Even if it is just fictionary.

But on the other side, there are more and more people who don’t want to participate in the hype about perfection and superlatives.

At www.craftfail.com everybody can post their manual disasters to celebrate / commiserate with other DIYers.

The blog my life is average offers everybody the possibility to share there very ordinary days. Instead of liking a post, you can vote on whether it’s “average” or “meh”.

(picture from Paul Gerald “A few thoughts on (simply) accepting reality.” )

Our lifes are more than perfect images. Reality bites NOT.