The world of Instagram models got a little bit smaller last night after Fenty Beauty posted a photo of its newest model: Shudu.
“Living in color,” the beauty handle posted and tagged its model Shudu.
Fenty Beauty has close to 3 million Instagram followers so a lot of people naturally wondered exactly who Shudu was and why nobody had heard of the beauty before.
Today, Shudu has an Instagram page with close to 35,000 followers but only 17 posts. Pretty wild for someone who supposedly makes a living from photography.
And that’s when people started to realize that Shudu was almost too perfect. Comments like “Is she a robot?” and “You are a Barbie” peppered her account.
It looks like those people were on to something because Shudu is not in fact a real person. She was created by photographer Cameron-James Wilson and is entirely digital. There is no living cell in her.
“It’s meant to be beautiful art which empowers people,” Wilson explained. “It’s not trying to take away an opportunity from anyone or replace anyone. She’s trying to complement those people.”
This serves as a really important lesson to the general public out there. For several months, Shudu’s followers probably thought they were following a real person. Her account even posted realistic things like “I have some beautiful new shoots coming up!!” and #MelaninPoppin.
But now we know that she’s totally fake and this is the stupidest thing to ever exist on Instagram. What’s the point of a fake model? Isn’t the whole purpose of models to serve as the ideal human image? To get as close to perfection as possible? Using computers to achieve perfection is cheating. And while it’s no secret that most models are digitally edited and heavily photoshopped, they’re still living, breathing humans. There’s a reason people don’t follow mannequins on Instagram.
It’s cool that we live in the 21st century and we can basically create an alternate universe via CGI but this is way too creepy for me to get behind. Humans should set the standard for beauty. Not computers.
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