If anyone has their Instagram game on lock, it's Kim Kardashian. With her 102 million followers and impeccable dusty pink aesthetic, a scroll through her timeline is like a walk in a glowy, Lumee dream world. But of course, everything's not always as it seems—so when Kim Kardashian revealed her biggest Instagram regret to Patrick Starrr, obviously I was glued to what it could be. But, oof: the answer is both eye-opening about how impossibly high our standards have climbed and kind of a cop-out.
ICYMI, last week Kardashian posted a video of Starrr doing her makeup, below. As happens when you're getting your makeup done, the conversation turned pretty intimate (nothing like someone touching your face to bring down barriers, seriously). After Starrr asked what her biggest Instagram regret is, Kardashian replied that she hates her hands. To which she expanded by revealing, "One of my biggest photo regrets is when I got engaged, I had the shortest nails when I showed my picture. And I was like, ‘Ugh, it would have looked so much better with long nails.’”
On one hand, this comment is deeply relatable. Who hasn't looked back at a college profile picture and wished you'd gone with an outfit that, I don't know, didn't involve a poncho? Everyone has regrets (damn you, ponchos). Add in that the photo is capturing what we've been told by a billion-dollar industry is "supposed to be" a picture-perfect moment—her engagement—and I'm sure thousands of women have felt this exact pressure of wanting to have a mani that meets these standards. But on the other hand: how terrible is a world where even Kim Kardashian doesn't think she's measuring up to expectations?
At this point, we know that social media is skewing our perceptions and more often than not, making everyone feel pretty crappy about not looking like the filtered, Facetuned, "perfect" versions of people coming at us. But if even the woman who literally wrote the book about looking great online—Selfies is nothing if not a masterclass in feeling yourself—doesn't think her engagement photo is good enough, maybe the pressure we're all putting on ourselves is getting out of hand.
