By now I’m sure we have all learned to approach social media with a certain level of skepticism. We know what we see on Instagram is not a full, unedited account of peoples’ lives. We know the vacation pictures on Facebook do not represent what people do most of the time. They may not even very accurately represent that vacation. Failures and stupid thoughts are rarely Tweeted about. Personally, I find it all rather logical and don’t think people of the 21 Century are by nature more vain or shallow than people of the past. We have always wanted to show ourselves in the best possible light and now we have the time, resources and tools to do it on an unprecedented scale.

While I am not particularly alarmed by these developments, we do need to learn how to deal with them, how to adjust. Some people get off social media entirely, some limit their use and set boundaries. Most, I believe, have principles they follow, even if they’ve never thought about them very deeply. I don’t struggle with my private social media presence: I only really use Facebook which I find very useful, living away from my home country. I don’t edit the pictures or contemplate my posts for too long, it is just a means to keep people updated on what I’m doing and vice versa. My blogging self, however, is a different story.

I think any sort of style, beauty and lifestyle blogging (I use blogging as a stand-in for a broader set of things: Instagram, YouTube, whatever channels people use to communicate on these topics) presents a specific challenge for the creators. On one hand, most of us want to publish lovely pictures, that is largely the raison d’être of having a lifestyle blog. I am generalising, there are other ways to do it, but for an average style or beauty blogger, pictures are important. And these days, you can filter the shit out of your photos and look flawless on all of them, if you want to. For top influencers, it isn’t difficult to post perfect pictures from wonderful locations in beautiful clothes every single day – and to be fair, many of them don’t even need to filter anything, as this is what their lives have become and they are, often, exceptionally beautiful people. For them, the balance they have to strike is mostly about relatability: there is nothing wrong with aspirational blogging and there definitely is a large audience for that, but something needs to draw people in, if they cannot directly relate to the lifestyle or the look of these influencers.

I’m not Chiara Ferragni or Chriselle Lim, so my problems are obviously different and smaller in scale. But I do think about the difference of the blog me and the real life me. One of the main reasons I started blogging was that I love creating moods through clothes and I have those concepts in my head that demand to be executed. In that sense (specifically on style content), I often think of my blog more as a magazine and less as a chronicle of my everyday life, although I also shoot more practical things and would never post anything I wouldn’t wear in real life. I also never ask photographs to photoshop me on the images (unless I have a bruise on my leg or something), although they obviously do edit them to some extent. But the thing is, unlike a magazine, I only have my own 39-year old body and face to play with, I cannot hire a more athletic model for one shoot and a more waifish one for the next. So if enhancing the shadows on the photos helps me to get the mood on the page (screen), I’m fine with that.

It does, however, create a gap between what you see here and how I look in life. It’s of course not only about photo editing (and as I said, it’s not like a huge airbrushing goes on anyway) – most of the work is done by hair, make-up, good light and well-chosen poses. I am not much of a model, but I know that I look more slender from the side, my face its best in half-profile, the right side towards the camera. These conditions are hardly ever (by which I mean never) met in my actual life. And while I can get close to the effect in the pictures, when I do my hair and full make-up and put beautiful clothes on, this is not something I do on an average day. In fact, I think these days I make less of an effort in my everyday life because of the blog, as a big chunk of my dressing-up energy is spent on the shoots. I am beginning to understand all those models who say they don’t want to wear any makeup or fancy clothes, because they have to do it so much for work.

So sometimes when I walk to work, without any make-up on, hair moderately greasy, wearing uninspired clothes, I wonder what the blog readers would think if they could see me. On one hand I think it’s healthy that I don’t care so much about how I look to make any effort if I don’t feel like it. On the other, I almost feel I’m letting people down by straying so far from the bold, visually interesting persona I like to project. I also have one of those faces that can look anything from ordinary to attractive to, frankly, rather ugly – also not helping on these days when I have only done the absolute minimum to look presentable.

There is no neat conclusion to this rant. I just have to try to keep some sort of balance on the blog of being appealing and authentic, as the latter has always been extremely important for me. If you don’t know me in real life, but would like to see me in a less edited form, you can follow me on Instagram (obviously that’s curated, too, but I post pictures there that are just taken on my iPhone in daily situations). If you have any thoughts, please feel free to share.

Dress Ketlin Bachmann, hair Natallia at Helen Heinroos Hair, makeup Grete Madisson, image Krõõt Tarkmeel.